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Artemis astronauts will need a vehicle on the moon. NASA hired 3 companies to design it

Nasa has hired three companies to create preliminary designs for lunar vehicles that artemis astronauts will use to traverse the moon as early as 2029..

For the first time in five decades, American astronauts are on the cusp of returning to the moon .

NASA's Artemis missions, the first lunar program since the Apollo era, aims to send astronauts back to the moon ahead of the larger goal of one day reaching Mars. And when the day comes in about two years that those intrepid explorers make it to the lunar surface, they'll need a vehicle that can help them navigate the celestial body's crater-pocked terrain.

The U.S. space agency announced Wednesday that it has hired three companies to create preliminary designs for lunar vehicles that can be driven and can also operate autonomously. Of those three companies, only one will ultimately be selected to build the vehicle that will make it to the moon, NASA said.

Here's what to know about the planned vehicle and the historic Artemis lunar missions ahead.

Solar eclipse: NASA is launching 3 sounding rockets into space during the total solar eclipse

Why NASA needs a lunar terrain vehicle

NASA began seeking proposals in May for a next-generation lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) to help astronauts traverse and transport cargo across the moon's unexplored south polar region during upcoming Artemis missions.

Officials do not anticipate that the vehicle will be ready by the time astronauts of Artemis III make their way to the moon's surface sometime in 2026.

The vehicle, which would be used for crewed operations beginning with Artemis V in 2029, is intended to be a cross between an Apollo-era lunar rover and an uncrewed Mars rover like Perseverance or Curiosity, NASA said. Giving the vehicle robotic, remote operation capabilities will allow for scientific tests and exploration to continue even when astronauts are not present on the moon, according to NASA.

NASA had asked companies to create proposed designs that accommodate two suited astronauts and include a robotic arm or other mechanism. The vehicle will also need to be able to survive the extreme temperatures of the lunar south pole, a region where water ice is thought to be abundant.

Water ice in the region would not only help sustain astronauts on the surface, but it also would be a source of hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel as NASA looks ahead to missions to Mars .

“We will use the LTV to travel to locations we might not otherwise be able to reach on foot, increasing our ability to explore and make new scientific discoveries,” NASA Chief Exploration Scientist Jacob Bleacher said in a Wednesday statement. “With the Artemis crewed missions, and during remote operations when there is not a crew on the surface, we are enabling science and discovery on the moon year around.”

How to watch NASA's lunar vehicle announcement

The televised event took place at 4 p.m. EST Wednesday at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The news conference aired live on  NASA+ , NASA Television, the  NASA app , and the U.S. space agency’s  website .

NASA's official YouTube channel provided a live stream of the even and also released a 90-second trailer about the autonomous vehicle after the announcement.

Watch it here:

Astronauts will return to moon as part of Artemis missions

In previous years, NASA and space agencies in other nations have once again set their sights on the moon in a renewed interest in reaching the lunar surface.

For the United States, American astronauts have not set foot on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. NASA's Artemis program hopes to get the nation back to the moon to establish a base of operations ahead of crewed trips to Mars.

NASA had  intended  to launch its  Artemis II  astronauts into orbit by the end of the year on a 10-day trip circumnavigating the moon, ahead of a moon landing itself a year later for Artemis III. But the Artemis program missions have  since been delayed  by at least a year after NASA encountered a slew of issues, including a battery flaw on the vehicle that will ferry astronauts to the moon.

In the meantime, preparations have continued to ensure the program stays on track.

In mid-March, SpaceX conducted its most successful test yet of the Starship rocket that will one day ferry U.S. astronauts to the moon's surface. NASA had awarded the company a $2.9 billion contract  in 2021 to develop the first commercial human lander for its Artemis III mission.

The contract for the lunar terrain vehicles is worth up to $4.6 billion over the next 15 years, NASA said. Under the contract, NASA would not own the vehicles themselves but is instead only purchasing the service of creating them.

One of the companies selected to design the lunar vehicle, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, was also the private company that in February became the fist commercial entity to ever land an uncrewed spacecraft on the moon's surface . NASA, which was the primary customer for the mission, paid a hefty sum to have a payload of scientific instruments included aboard the lander to collect data that will help the agency prepare for its own lunar missions.

Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo.; and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif. were also selected to come up with preliminary designs, according to NASA. The agency will work with the three companies for a year before NASA will choose one of them for the demonstration phase.

“We look forward to the development of the Artemis generation lunar exploration vehicle to help us advance what we learn at the Moon,” Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in a Wednesday statement. “This vehicle will greatly increase our astronauts’ ability to explore and conduct science on the lunar surface while also serving as a science platform between crewed missions.”

Contributing: James Powel

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]

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The Future of Space Tourism Is Now. Well, Not Quite.

From zero-pressure balloon trips to astronaut boot camps, reservations for getting off the planet — or pretending to — are skyrocketing. The prices, however, are still out of this world.

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By Debra Kamin

Ilida Alvarez has dreamed of traveling to space since she was a child. But Ms. Alvarez, a legal-mediation firm owner, is afraid of flying, and she isn’t a billionaire — two facts that she was sure, until just a few weeks ago, would keep her fantasy as out of reach as the stars. She was wrong.

Ms. Alvarez, 46, and her husband, Rafael Landestoy, recently booked a flight on a 10-person pressurized capsule that — attached to a massive helium-filled balloon — will gently float to 100,000 feet while passengers sip champagne and recline in ergonomic chairs. The reservation required a $500 deposit; the flight itself will cost $50,000 and last six to 12 hours.

“I feel like it was tailor-made for the chickens like me who don’t want to get on a rocket,” said Ms. Alvarez, whose flight, organized by a company called World View , is scheduled to depart from the Grand Canyon in 2024.

Less than a year after Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson kicked off a commercial space race by blasting into the upper atmosphere within weeks of each other last summer, the global space tourism market is skyrocketing, with dozens of companies now offering reservations for everything from zero-pressure balloon trips to astronaut boot camps and simulated zero-gravity flights. But don’t don your spacesuit just yet. While the financial services company UBS estimates the space travel market will be worth $3 billion by 2030, the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to approve most out-of-this-world trips, and construction has not started on the first space hotel. And while access and options — not to mention launchpads — are burgeoning, space tourism remains astronomically expensive for most.

First, what counts as space travel?

Sixty miles (about 100 kilometers) above our heads lies the Kármán line, the widely accepted aeronautical boundary of the earth’s atmosphere. It’s the boundary used by the Féderátion Aéronautique Internationale, which certifies and controls global astronautical records. But many organizations in the United States, including the F.A.A. and NASA, define everything above 50 miles to be space.

Much of the attention has been focused on a trio of billionaire-led rocket companies: Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin , whose passengers have included William Shatner; Mr. Branson’s Virgin Galactic , where tickets for a suborbital spaceflight start at $450,000; and Elon Musk’s SpaceX , which in September launched an all-civilian spaceflight, with no trained astronauts on board. Mr. Branson’s inaugural Virgin Galactic flight in 2021 reached about 53 miles, while Blue Origin flies above the 62-mile mark. Both are eclipsed by SpaceX, whose rockets charge far deeper in to the cosmos, reaching more than 120 miles above Earth.

Balloons, like those operated by World View, don’t go nearly as high. But even at their maximum altitude of 18 or 19 miles, operators say they float high enough to show travelers the curvature of the planet, and give them a chance to experience the overview effect — an intense perspective shift that many astronauts say kicks in when you view Earth from above.

Now, how to get there …

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, which are both licensed for passenger space travel by the F.A.A., are open for ticket sales. (Blue Origin remains mum on pricing.) Both companies currently have hundreds or even thousands of earthlings on their wait lists for a whirl to the edge of space. SpaceX charges tens of millions of dollars for its further-reaching flights and is building a new facility in Texas that is currently under F.A.A. review.

Craig Curran is a major space enthusiast — he’s held a reserved seat on a Virgin Galactic flight since 2011 — and the owner of Deprez Travel in Rochester, N.Y. The travel agency has a special space travel arm, Galactic Experiences by Deprez , through which Mr. Curran sells everything from rocket launch tickets to astronaut training.

Sales in the space tourism space, Mr. Curran acknowledges, “are reasonably difficult to make,” and mostly come from peer-to-peer networking. “You can imagine that people who spend $450,000 to go to space probably operate in circles that are not the same as yours and mine,” he said.

Some of Mr. Curran’s most popular offerings include flights where you can experience the same stomach-dropping feeling of zero gravity that astronauts feel in space, which he arranges for clients via chartered, specialized Boeing 727s that are flown in parabolic arcs to mimic being in space. Operators including Zero G also offer the service; the cost is around $8,200.

You can almost count the number of completed space tourist launches on one hand — Blue Origin has had four; SpaceX, two. Virgin Galactic, meanwhile, on Thursday announced the launch of its commercial passenger service, previously scheduled for late 2022, was delayed until early 2023. Many of those on waiting lists are biding their time before blastoff by signing up for training. Axiom Space, which contracts with SpaceX, currently offers NASA-partnered training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Virgin Galactic, which already offers a “customized Future Astronaut Readiness program” at its Spaceport America facility in New Mexico, is also partnering with NASA to build a training program for private astronauts.

Would-be space tourists should not expect the rigor that NASA astronauts face. Training for Virgin Galactic’s three-hour trips is included in the cost of a ticket and lasts a handful of days; it includes pilot briefings and being “fitted for your bespoke Under Armour spacesuit and boots,” according to its website.

Not ready for a rocket? Balloon rides offer a less hair-raising celestial experience.

“We go to space at 12 miles an hour, which means that it’s very smooth and very gentle. You’re not rocketing away from earth,” said Jane Poynter, a co-founder and co-chief executive of Space Perspective , which is readying its own touristic balloon spaceship, Spaceship Neptune. If all goes according to plan, voyages are scheduled to begin departing from Florida in 2024, at a cost of $125,000 per person. That’s a fraction of the price tag for Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, but still more than double the average annual salary of an American worker.

Neither Space Perspective nor World View has the required approval yet from the F.A.A. to operate flights.

Unique implications

Whether a capsule or a rocket is your transport, the travel insurance company battleface launched a civilian space insurance plan in late 2021, a direct response, said chief executive Sasha Gainullin, to an increase in space tourism interest and infrastructure. Benefits include accidental death and permanent disablement in space and are valid for spaceflights on operators like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, as well as on stratospheric balloon rides. They’ve had many inquiries, Mr. Gainullin said, but no purchases just yet.

“Right now it’s such high-net-worth individuals who are traveling to space, so they probably don’t need insurance,” he said. “But for quote-unquote regular travelers, I think we’ll see some takeups soon.”

And as the industry grows, so perhaps will space travel’s impact on the environment. Not only do rocket launches have immense carbon footprints, even some stratospheric balloon flights have potentially significant implications: World View’s balloons are powered by thousands of cubic meters of helium, which is a limited resource . But Ted Parson, a professor of environmental law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that space travel’s environmental impact is still dwarfed by civil aviation. And because space travel is ultra-niche, he believes it’s likely to stay that way.

“Despite extensive projections, space tourism is likely to remain a tiny fraction of commercial space exploration,” he said. “It reminds me of tourism on Mt. Everest. It’s the indulgence of very rich people seeking a transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime experience, and the local environmental burden is intense.”

Stay a while?

In the future, space enthusiasts insist, travelers won’t be traveling to space just for the ride. They’ll want to stay a while. Orbital Assembly Corporation, a manufacturing company whose goal is to colonize space, is currently building the world’s first space hotels — two ring-shaped properties that will orbit Earth, called Pioneer Station and Voyager Station. The company, quite optimistically, projects an opening date of 2025 for Pioneer Station, with a capacity of 28 guests. The design for the larger Voyager Station , which they say will open in 2027, promises villas and suites, as well as a gym, restaurant and bar. Both provide the ultimate luxury: simulated gravity. Axiom Space , a space infrastructure company, is currently building the world’s first private space station; plans include Philippe Starck-designed accommodations for travelers to spend the night.

Joshua Bush, chief executive of travel agency Avenue Two Travel , has sold a handful of seats on upcoming Virgin Galactic flights to customers. The market for space travel (and the sky-high prices that come with it), he believes, will evolve much like civilian air travel did.

“In the beginning of the 20th century, only very affluent people could afford to fly,” he said. “Just as we have Spirit and Southwest Airlines today, there will be some sort of equivalent of that in space travel, too. Hopefully within my lifetime.”

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Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram , Twitter and Facebook . And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for 2022.

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This document does not bind the public, except as authorized by law or as incorporated into a contract. This document is uncontrolled when printed. Check the NASA Online Directives Information System (NODIS) Library to verify that this is the correct version before use: https://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov .

AIR & SPACE MAGAZINE

Star city at 50.

Change comes to the place where spaceflight was born.

Michael Cassutt

Deep in a birch forest 25 miles northeast of Moscow’s Red Square is a collection of apartment blocks and gray buildings, some rather oddly shaped, that gives the impression more of a campus than of a town. On many days the roar of jets from a nearby airfield shatters the silence, but otherwise the place is quiet, remote, apparently serene—a Russian gated community.

Known as the Federal Budget State Research Center and Cosmonaut Training Center, the complex bears the name of a national hero, Yuri Gagarin. NASA calls it the GCTC, short for Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. More popularly, and slightly inaccurately, it goes by the name of Star City (a better translation is “Starry Town”), and at the age of 50, it is the world’s oldest facility dedicated to the business of training humans to fly, work, and live in space.

Over its lifetime, the center has trained more than 120 crews for launches on Vostok, Voskhod, and Soyuz spacecraft, or for trips to Mir and the International Space Station on the U.S. space shuttle. Most of the trainees have been citizens of the Soviet Union and Russia, but graduates of the center include more than 140 Americans, Europeans and Japanese, half a dozen Chinese astronauts, and all the world’s space tourists, from U.S. millionaires Dennis Tito and two-time flier Charles Simonyi to Canada’s Guy Laliberté and Iranian-born Anousheh Ansari. Center officials estimate that 400-plus people have studied in its classrooms and trained in its simulators.

Today the center is facing challenges unlike any it has ever known. Its major buildings, constructed in the 1960s, are crumbling under the dual assaults of weather and age, and for the first time in its history, the facility is under new management. In July 2009, control passed from the Russian air force to Roskosmos, the country’s civilian space agency. The center’s director, veteran military cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev, was retired.

His replacement? Civilian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, at 52 a veteran of six spaceflights and two tours on the International Space Station, the first cosmonaut to fly on the shuttle, and holder of the world record for time spent in space (803 days). Krikalev is generally considered one of the most capable and popular space travelers in the world. (He even flew—and remains friends with—Charles Bolden, the current NASA administrator.) But will skills learned in space prepare him for the job of re-energizing Star City as it enters its second half-century?

THE SOVIET MINISTRY OF DEFENSE order creating a “Cosmonaut Training Center”—Military Unit 26266—came down on January 11, 1960. The center, officially created as part of the Soviet aerospace medical establishment, was first directed by flight surgeon Yevgeny Karpov. A site was chosen not far from the Chkalov Air Base, home of the USSR’s military flight test center, and within reach of both the Red Banner Air Force Academy in Monino and the Korolev Design Bureau in Kaliningrad, where the Vostok spacecraft that carried the first cosmonauts to orbit was built. When Karpov, his staff, and the original cosmonauts—a group that included Gagarin, Gherman Titov, and Alexei Leonov—moved to the location in 1960, they took up just one building.

Over the next decade, Star City grew in size and budget, expanding to a staff of 600, with more than 60 cosmonauts. The team worked on plans for lunar landing missions as well as manned military projects, and got its own aircraft support unit, the 70th Special Destination Wing, based at Chkalov. The center’s directors were air force generals, many of them former cosmonauts. With the abandonment of the lunar program and the scaling back of military efforts in the 1970s, the facility concentrated on training cosmonauts for long-duration space station missions on Salyut and, in the 1980s, Mir.

Star City first opened its doors—grudgingly—to Americans in 1973, when NASA astronauts began training for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. A special residence was built for the Americans on the grounds of the center (the building was later converted into the Profilactorium, a medical center for crews recuperating from long-duration missions. It now houses the NASA director of Russian operations and his team).

NASA has had a permanent presence at Star City since 1994, when astronauts Norm Thagard and Bonnie Dunbar began to train for the first shuttle-Mir mission. Integrating the civilian U.S. team into a closed Russian military center wasn’t easy. Driving onto the grounds for the first time one cold February day in 1994, astronaut Ken Cameron looked at the grim buildings, barbed-wire fences, and armed guards and told his small team, “Well, guys, there’s only a few of us cowboys, and a hell of a lot of Indians.”

Culture shock was a serious problem for the Americans. Recalls astronaut Mike Lopez-Alegria, NASA’s director of operations in Russia from 1996 to 1997: “You couldn’t find a restaurant. The telephone situation was bad. There were no gas stations. Gasoline was sold from trucks that were just pulled up along the road.”

Bert Vis, a Dutch space researcher, co-authored the only published history of the GCTC, Russia’s Cosmonauts: Inside the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center , which came out in 2005. Originally invited to Star City by a cosmonaut pen pal, Vis has made 17 visits, for a week or two each time, since 1991, when the Soviet Union disbanded. In the early days, Vis bunked in his host’s apartments, could not use a computer, and barely had access to a phone. Lately he has been able to book rooms at a hotel, though landline phones are still iffy.

The greatest change since the Soviet breakup has been the way Star City residents react to foreign visitors. At first “people would stare at me,” Vis says. “They were not used to seeing a foreigner there. When they heard me speak English, they would turn their heads and look at who that stranger was.

“There were older military officers who refused to meet with me, thinking that talking to a Westerner would harm their careers,” he adds. “Don’t forget that the old generation owed everything they had to Communism.”

Today, NASA astronauts live at Star City for months at a time, in Western-style cottages. And, Vis says, “The latest groups of cosmonauts are much more open to non-Russians, and don’t see the NASA guys and Europeans as spies who come to steal their technology.”

That may ease cooperation with Americans, but Krikalev also has to contend with other culture gaps and rivalries—among Russians. At the space station’s mission control center in Moscow, the staffers, including the all-powerful flight directors, are employees of the Energiya Corporation, which builds the spacecraft. But the capcoms (capsule communicators, or “ glavnis ” in Russian), who communicate with the cosmonauts in flight, come from Star City. GCTC doctors handle all the preflight medical care for cosmonauts, and work with them on a daily basis. But during missions, physicians from another organization, the Institute for Medical-Biological Problems, are in charge. According to John McBrine, a NASA veteran of four tours in Russia, “There’s no way the IMBP doctors have the same relationship to the crew the GCTC guys do.”

Another fundamental rift is between the two kinds of cosmonaut: the military pilots in Star City and the civilian engineers like Krikalev, who come from Energiya. The smaller Energiya team lives and works in Moscow, commuting to Star City only when assigned to a specific program. Beginning in 1966, Soviet law required each cosmonaut crew to have a commander from the GCTC, as well as a flight engineer from “the organization that built the vehicle,” meaning Energiya. It would be as if NASA had ordered every Gemini crew to include an engineer from McDonnell aircraft.

For years, both organizations fought for the right to command space missions. “GCTC rightly felt that every spacecraft commander should be one of their pilots,” says McBrine. In some cases, a veteran Energiya engineer had to work under a rookie GCTC commander—not the most harmonious of situations.

Today the training center is part of Roskosmos, which was created only in 1994 to serve as a Russian counterpart of NASA. Headed by Anatoly Perminov, the agency is trying to foster a thriving Russian space industry. It intends to end the country’s reliance on the Baikonur Cosmodrome, located in the independent nation of Kazakhstan. Roskosmos plans to transform a missile base at Svobodny, in the Russian far east, into the Vostochny (“Eastern”) Cosmodrome, and hopes to launch cosmonauts from there by 2018.

Though Roskosmos owns Star City, the agency doesn’t necessarily like the arrangement. According to former cosmonaut Yuri Baturin, “Roskosmos did not plan to absorb GCTC. But the Ministry of Defense specified reductions in armed forces, and simply included GCTC in that.” Apollo-Soyuz astronaut Tom Stafford put it more directly: “The Russian air force couldn’t afford to keep paying the bills. They don’t have an interest in manned spaceflight—they never really did.”

The shift from military to civilian ownership poses a staffing problem for Krikalev. The center was allowed to keep 210 military employees, and another 110 workers were allowed to leave military service and stay in their jobs. But that still leaves dozens of positions unfilled, and many military people stationed in Star City scrambling to find assignments elsewhere.

To hire replacements, Krikalev has to offer salaries competitive with those of private industry, placing extreme pressure on his budget, which needs to be doubled to “keep the center functioning properly.” He plans to recruit directly from Moscow’s best technical schools, Bauman Moscow State Technical University and Moscow Aviation Institute, but says, “I’m not giving up on graduates from military schools.” Also on his wish list are space and missile students from Mozhaisky Academy, in his hometown of Leningrad. He’d like the cosmonaut corps to be larger and more diverse, noting that only one of 34 Russian cosmonauts is a woman.

Then there is Star City’s aging infrastructure. Most of the center’s buildings were constructed during the glory days of the 1960s. Some “look like they’ve been shelled,” Krikalev complains. Richard Garriott, the video game entrepreneur who financed his own trip to the space station on the Soyuz flight TMA-13 in October 2008, says, “They have very limited money for exterior work, but always have money for the essentials: simulators, the centrifuge, the hydro-lab.”

Under military control, the training center’s flight support unit, the Seregin Wing, had 16 aircraft, from Aero L-39 training jets to Tupolev Tu-154 transports. These were used by the cosmonauts to maintain pilot proficiency, and for weightlessness training. But in late 2009, the Russian air force disbanded the wing and dispersed the airplanes. “Except for one,” Krikalev notes, “a Tu-154 with glass hatches in its fuselage,” which was formerly used by the Ministry of Defense in NATO’s “Open Skies” program.

Juggling these management problems while continuing to train space station crews has been difficult, says Baturin—“like rebuilding the conveyor belt while you still manufacture the item. Imagine what a car would look like under those circumstances.”

Star City’s main business, of course, is spaceflight training. And the methods developed there over 50 years are often quite different from NASA’s. The GCTC trainers emphasize theoretical classroom work, complete with regular graded exams, while NASA concentrates on practical skills, teaching astronauts to perform specific tasks like operating the station’s robot arm or conducting a spacewalk. “GCTC will test you on the nature of an electronic relay,” says Lopez-Alegria, “but knowing that doesn’t help me operationally. We don’t do systems, we do skill sets.”

In the old days, the GCTC published few manuals; cosmonauts took handwritten notes at lecture sessions. Staffers were reluctant to print and distribute written materials, because they saw the information as proprietary. (In early 2008, South Korean astronaut candidate Ko San was removed from a Soyuz crew assignment for taking workbooks out of Star City without permission. According to one former NASA astronaut, manuals are still officially restricted to the center.)

As a first-time flier, Garriott saw value in the Russian methods, including the emphasis on theory: “At first I wanted to rush through that phase. But eventually I became a big fan of the Russian top-down system.” For example, he says, “I started training, right from zero, with my crew and with the same small team of instructors. Over the weeks and months, these two or three instructors followed every step of my progress: what I got, what I didn’t get, how I responded to every situation. We passed our exams, then flew down to Baikonur, where we were in quarantine for two weeks. We suited up, got out to the pad, got into the Soyuz. And on the radio was one of my instructors! I hadn’t realized that would be the case. But it was so reassuring! I realized, That guy knows me . Back on the ground, after the flight, the crew starts its debrief—and the same instructor is there too.”

This emphasis on personal relationships is one of the reasons the glavnis in Russian mission control are from Star City, not Energiya. NASA has started to move toward a similar model: Many space station capcoms are now members of the training teams, not fellow astronauts. “Both sides have learned from each other,” says McBrine.

STAR CITY IS MORE THAN just a school for space travelers. It also is a company town with a population of 6,000, including retired cosmonauts, training specialists, engineers, and administrative staffers and their families, as well as businessmen, cooks, and schoolteachers. There are baptisms and weddings. Children of cosmonauts have married and raised families here, and a Russian Orthodox church was dedicated last winter—a first for Star City. There are, of late, many funerals.

For 49 years, the military director of the GCTC doubled as the “mayor” of this unique village. But the shift to civilian control brought an election in June 2009. The winner was Nikolai Rybkin, a 63-year-old retired air force colonel who was Star City’s State Security (KGB) representative from 1976 to 2001. Rybkin was a popular figure in Star City because he paid attention to things that mattered to its residents. “He was great about getting a gazebo built and returning the swans to the lake,” says one NASA official who asked to remain anonymous. “I just wish he’d also put more street lights along the roads.”

At the time of his election, Rybkin was in jail, charged with smuggling, and so was unable to take office. In late October 2009, Russian government officials appointed former cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, a Rybkin supporter, to take his place—which speaks to the insular nature of Star City. During the glory days of the 1960s, residents had special access to food and consumer goods, and lived in apartments that were double the standard Soviet size. The price for these privileges was submission to strict military and KGB control. Three cosmonauts from Gagarin’s group were expelled for “violation of training discipline” when one of them started a drunken argument with the local militia. Over the years, others were sent packing for marital discord, embarrassing personal connections (engineer Boris Belousov was discovered to have Ukrainian relatives who had fought on the side of the Germans during World War II), or failing to appreciate the Communist Party (Eduard Kugno openly criticized the organization as “a pack of lickspittles”).

In the old days, it was also risky to criticize Star City management. In 1967 engineer Gennady Kolesnikov, while a candidate for the cosmonaut corps, complained about training methods and was ordered to see the doctors. “I was checked for ailments, and they found 12!” he told Bert Vis. With this “medical disqualification,” he was transferred to a teaching job outside the center.

Star City’s managers often used the medical department as a disciplinary arm, a ruse that veteran cosmonauts knew well. Following his 1965 Voskhod 2 flight, Pavel Belyayev was so suspicious of the center’s doctors that he skipped medical exams for months. Tragically, he developed a bleeding ulcer that turned into peritonitis, which killed him.

Cosmonauts aren’t always exemplars of the healthy lifestyle. Garriott’s backup, Australian entrepreneur Nik Halik, recalls “working out in the gym with cosmonauts, then walking outside to see them puffing cigarettes and drinking vodka.” The darkest side of life at Star City has long been alcoholism. One unnamed veteran cosmonaut says that “90 percent” of the staff of one engineering department drank too heavily. The affliction is most common among the dozens of retired pilots and engineers who were selected for cosmonaut training in the 1960s, moved permanently to Star City, then never made it to the launch pad. But the problem isn’t limited to the unflowns. To this day, visitors can find famous names from Salyut and Mir crews stumbling drunk down icy sidewalks. Halik says he drank so much during his year-plus at Star City that now he “can’t stand the sight or even the thought of vodka.”

Maybe it’s because of the small-town insularity that the 1997 class of nine cosmonaut candidates included three second generation spacemen: Sergei Volkov (son of the new mayor), Roman Romanenko (son of three-time flier Yuri Romanenko), and Alexandr Skvortsov, whose father Alexandr was a cosmonaut candidate in the 1960s. This isn’t necessarily nepotism. Since the 1990s, young Russians have not seen becoming a cosmonaut as the plum opportunity it once was. Interest in the most recent Energiya recruitment in 2005 was so dismal that the company had to go looking for new hires among grad students at Bauman Moscow State Technical University and at Moscow Aviation Institute.

The problem may be a lack of exciting new missions. “Unflown cosmonauts concentrate on future work on [the space station],” Yuri Baturin says. “Those who have completed flights look into the future, and they are often disappointed by the absence of clear plans.” Leroy Chiao, a NASA astronaut who trained in Star City off and on for five years, remembers that cosmonauts and astronauts “didn’t talk about lunar flights, knowing that it was beyond the timeframe of our careers.”

The inbred nature of Star City’s society does have an upside. Richard Garriott—himself the son of an astronaut, Skylab and shuttle veteran Owen Garriott—says, “When I was growing up in the Johnson Space Center community, the astronauts were mostly test pilots—part of an old boy’s network. They played hard, and they played away from home. They rarely appeared at family gatherings, picnics, kids’ baseball games. They had hangouts no one knew about. Star City is completely the opposite.”

Garriott recalls a night in February 2008, shortly after arriving at Star City, when he and Halik entered the Soyuz Café, “a shiny jewel of new construction” that he describes as “half digital, half dacha.” They were immediately invited to a family gathering. “It was for the next ISS crew, and there were babies and grandparents in attendance, in addition to the adults. We sat down. The host welcomed everyone, and every five minutes or so he would ask somebody to stand up and introduce a guest and offer a toast—to the crew, to the future, and so on. I found similar scenes repeated there almost every night for the next year.

“Part of what I experienced was unique—possibly only to Star City. But the vibe you got was ‘Someone you know is in space.’ It’s part of everyday life. It’s continuous. It’s a very meaningful way to deal with this hazardous way of life.”

Rather than resenting the foreign spaceflight participants, says Garriott, the residents of Star City have welcomed them. Part of it is practical: “The Russians love the idea of foreigners buying seats on their vehicles. Not only does it offset the cost of flying, but it shows that people are willing to take a chance on their system.”

The openness to new ideas is typical of the cosmonauts now flying missions to the space station. “The earlier guys were a bit reserved or uncomfortable with us,” NASA’s Lopez-Alegria says. “We had been their cold war enemies.” Today’s cosmonauts are not only completely at home with international crewmates, they are also, thanks to Facebook and other social media, far more connected with the outside world. GCTC cosmonaut Max Suraev blogged his Expedition 21 stay on the station in 2009 and 2010, posing for pictures with a “ray gun” and joking about subjects from space food to his inability to choose clothing. In many of his posts, he was more candid than the typical NASA astronaut.

One of the middle-generation cosmonauts, Yuri Malenchenko, arrived in Star City in the late 1980s as a 26-year-old fighter pilot. He went on to serve a four-month tour on Mir in 1994, flew a short shuttle mission to the International Space Station in 2000, then participated in two long-duration missions in 2003 and 2007. Now 49 and training for a third ISS stay, he is philosophical about the ways the life of a Russian cosmonaut has changed over the course of his career: “Twenty-two years ago the country was different. Since then there have been many events that happened in politics and the economy. So now Star City is different, and we are different.”

Michael Cassutt is a novelist and television writer in Studio City, California.

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NASA May Be Dodging Rules That Restrict Employee Travel On Government Planes

In most cases public servants are supposed to fly coach with the rest of us, but NASA appears to be transporting officials on its own planes under the guise of pilot training — and evading rules designed to prevent misuse of aircraft.

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NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has taken four trips involving 22 flights on NASA-owned aircraft under the premise that they were primarily for pilot training.

O n October 10, 2021, a Gulfstream G-III jet that NASA uses for aerodynamics research flew to Washington, D.C. from Southern California. Documents reviewed by Forbes list the flight’s purpose as training – NASA requires its pilots to fly 100 hours annually in a plane or simulator to stay sharp.

But in D.C. the pilots welcomed passengers who usually wouldn’t be allowed aboard under federal rules meant to prevent public servants from misusing government aircraft: NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and a retinue including four other senior executives, according to public records obtained by Forbes . In a series of eight flights over the next five days, all of which were claimed to be for training, the pilots took them back west for a tour of NASA facilities up and down the California coast, as well as to SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles.

The records suggest that under the cover of training, NASA has spent roughly $335,000 over the past six years using agency aircraft to speed officials around the country who typically are required by law to fly coach or take ground transportation, at lower cost to taxpayers. That includes flights carrying Nelson, the highest ranking official at NASA who reports to the president, that Forbes estimates cost $143,000. (Estimates are based on documents showing flights on NASA aircraft where officials compared costs to commercial travel.)

Compared to NASA’s $25 billion budget, it may seem like a small misuse of government resources, but even less costly use of federal planes for travel has sparked investigations, like a recently completed Department of Transportation inspector general probe into $59,000 worth of flights taken by DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg and $98,500 by his predecessor Elaine Chao. (Both were cleared of wrongdoing.)

NASA says carrying passengers on training flights is a good use of resources since the pilots need to fly anyway.

But the documents Forbes obtained through an open records request suggest that with many flights, the tail wagged the dog, with timing and routes dictated to get officials somewhere they wanted to go, for purposes like travel to an awards ceremony or routine planning meetings. Many were multi-day trips that required spending on lodging for pilots.

U.S. government agencies own hundreds of aircraft to carry out missions like patrolling the border and fighting forest fires, but federal regulations restrict their use by employees for travel: Public servants should travel with the rest of us via airlines, the highways or rail, at lower cost to the taxpayer. However, a government aircraft or charter can be used if they would be cheaper, or no commercial flights are available within 24 hours. There are exceptions too, if there’s a security reason or “exceptional” time pressures.

In NASA’s case, guidelines it’s developed, which elaborate on rules issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), say that justifiable uses of agency planes for travel include ensuring astronauts get to the launch pad on time, or speeding them to Houston for medical evaluation after they land at the cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Russian flights back from the International Space Station.

NASA’s guidelines also say that if the primary purpose of a flight is pilot training, passengers can ride along too — and the agency doesn’t have to demonstrate that the purpose of the trip rises above ordinary business or that it’s cheaper than traveling commercial. “Such Passenger Transportation flight use may be presumed to result in cost savings to the U.S. Government,” spokesperson Jennifer Dooren wrote in response to questions from Forbes . She noted most NASA travel is conducted by commercial airlines, and passenger flight plans involving agency aircraft are reviewed to assure they comply with federal regulations.

“If there’s an official reason for people to go there for training it could be justified,” said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of government watchdog group Public Citizen. “If it’s a smokescreen and the purpose is that senior official getting where they’re trying to go, it’s a different story.”

Transporting passengers on training flights isn’t common practice at other federal agencies with large aircraft fleets. The Department of Interior told Forbes passengers aren’t allowed on training flights. The State Department said it would only allow travel on training flights “on rare occasions.”

A former FAA counsel who requested anonymity to speak openly said after Forbes described the flights to him that since they don’t appear to be mission critical, “they really ought to be using commercial aircraft, especially if convenient flight schedules and reasonable fares are available.”

The federal travel rules haven’t prevented abuses: In 2017, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned under fire over $1 million worth of flights on government and chartered planes, while four other Trump Cabinet members were criticized for flying at taxpayers’ expense.

In response, Mick Mulvaney, then head of OMB, issued a memo stating there should be few exceptions to using airlines, and the White House chief of staff would need to approve them. A NASA report says that in the wake of the Mulvaney memo, in fiscal 2019, the agency’s planes “only transported passengers as secondary missions to flights whose primary purpose was pilot proficiency training.”

But according to the public records reviewed by Forbes , many of those missions, like Nelson’s California tour, have timing and destinations that appear dictated for officials’ convenience rather than any training objective.

Take a series of training flights in August 2021 by a Beechcraft King Air that started with a 40-minute hop to Reagan National from its base, a nearby NASA facility in Wallops, Virginia. The plane picked up Nelson and eight of his deputies and flew them back to Wallops to watch the launch of a rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station. That spared them a 3-hour drive.

From there, the pilot training proceeded with a flight for Nelson and six other officials to Cleveland, where the next day they attended a ceremony marking the renaming of a flight test center after late astronaut Neil Armstrong.

A return flight the day after brought the total flight time to five hours at an estimated cost of $8,325, based on the public records.

Nelson, a former U.S. senator from Florida, has used NASA planes for other trips that seem more akin to grip-and-grin campaign appearances than advancing NASA’s science objectives.

In 2022 he flew on another training flight with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito to the Republican’s home state of West Virginia to appear at a university robotics contest, visit an elementary school and lunch with local NASA workers.

The Wallops-based King Air, a twin-engine turboprop that is one of just a handful of planes the agency owns with the safety features to legally carry passengers, seems also to have been frequently used as an air taxi for D.C.-area NASA staff, under the premise of pilot training.

For example, in 2018, seven employees traveled on it from Baltimore to Clarksburg, West Virginia, to meet with management of a NASA center there to discuss LGBTQ issues and conduct training described as “LGBT 101.”

There are three to four flights a day for $200 from D.C. to Morgantown, from which it’s a 40-minute drive to Clarksburg. The records suggest the NASA flight cost $2,536.

Later that year the plane flew to Hampton, Virginia, to pick up a single passenger, Steve Dover, an executive at NASA’s Langley Research Center, to take him to a meeting in Patuxent River, Maryland, saving Dover a 3-hour drive.

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Why travel to Moscow

Contrasts: 12th century monasteries and some of the tallest skyscrapers in Europe can be found side-by-side in this complex and captivating city. The diversity of this mega-city is astounding. Only a few steps away from the solemn red facade of the Kremlin and the sounds of righteous church bells, a buzzing night scene and alternative-fashion boutiques can be found.

Culture: In Moscow only the best goes. Be it a theatre, restaurant or gallery, the standards are certain to be world-class. The Bolshoi ballet company is reputed to be even better than the Mariinsky’s and “MMOMA” (Moscow’s museum of modern art) exhibits works of art as profound as any that could be found in the famed MOMA.

Convenience: Unlike the rest of Russia, it’s easy enough to get by with just English in Moscow and, driving excepted, it is surprisingly safe: the murder rate is lower than in some of America’s major cities.

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Why visit Moscow

It would take more than two days to walk around the perimeter of the biggest city in Europe, Moscow. Many of its inhabitants barely know what’s beyond the few blocks around their flat and there are so many attractions that it’s almost impossible to know where to start. If there is such a thing as an antidote to boredom, Moscow City is it. The mind-boggling range and diversity of things to do, places to eat, parks, historical monuments and more means that a vacation in Moscow has a wealth of activities to offer for every type of traveler, from young families to retirees.

Reasons to Vacation in Moscow in 2022

The Bolshoi theatre is familiar to almost everyone as Russia’s grandest theatre, but what people don’t know is that there are many more bolshoi (big) sites in Moscow that are worth travelling all the way to Moscow to see. For more than 100 years, the world’s biggest bell has been hidden behind the Kremlin’s walls and inside Moscow’s main park (which is bigger than some countries!) there is the world’s largest outdoor ice-rink. Travelers that visit Moscow can stay at the Izmailovo, Europe’s biggest hotel, then eat at the largest and most historic McDonald’s in Europe and after that have fun at the largest European indoor theme park!

Ancient Past & Stunning Architecture:

As those who travel to Moscow will see, just because Moscow is a city of record-breaking, glitzy high-rises doesn’t mean that there is no history. On the famous Arbat street, time-worn, wooden storehouses and century-old churches are squashed up against grey, soviet blocks which are then towered over by 21st century office-blocks. Unlike its much younger sibling, St Petersburg, Moscow’s roots stretch way back to the 12th century. Within the walls of the Kremlin, the city’s oldest building the Cathedral of Assumption can be admired in all its 500+ years of age.

Culture & Convenience

For a foreigner who has never visited Russia, Moscow is the perfect stepping stone into this great land of mystery. From the country’s best classical ballet troupes to snow-white troikas trotting through the parks, all the highlights of Russian culture can be had in Moscow without any of the complications that would be expected in other, less developed regions of Russia.

Cheap as Caviar

In Moscow, everything is bargain when with the current foreign exchange rates being what they are. Even caviar doesn’t seem so dear when the exchange rate is at 60rub to the dollar, so go on indulge yourself! Take your 2022 vacation in Moscow and have the best of both worlds, with European luxury at very affordable prices.

Lena, our guide in Moscow was excellent. She was very knowledgable and could answer any question we had for her. We liked that she could pick up on our interests and take us places we might not have thought of to go. When we realized that one of the places we had chosen to see would probably not be that interesting to us, she was able to arrange entry to the Diamond Fund and the Armoury for us. Riding the Metro with Lena was a real adventure and a lot of fun. In Saint Petersburg we found Anna well versed in the history of the Tsars and in the Hermitage collection. Arkady in Veliky Novgorod was a very good guide and answered all of our questions with ease. Novgorod was perhaps a long way to go for a day trip, but we did enjoy it. Vasily was a great driver to have and kept us safe with good humour and skill. We enjoyed ourselves so much, my daughter says she is already planning to return. We would both have no hesistation to recommend ExpresstoRussia to anyone we know.

Just wanted to let you know that My grandson Bruno and I couldn´t have been more pleased with our week in Moscow (6/15 - 6/21). We were absolutely enchanted with the whole experience, including getting lost a couple of times in the Metro during our free time. Although both our guides (both Eleanas) were excellent, I would particularly commend the first one (she took us to the Tatiakov, the KGB tour, and to that beautiful cemetery where so many great Russian artists, authors, composers, musicians, militarists, and politicians are buried). Her knowledge is encyclopedic; and her understanding of today´s Russia as a product of its past was, for us, truly enlightening. I will be taking another tour in Russia, with my wife, within the next two or three years. I will be in touch with you when the time comes. Meanwhile, I will refer you to other potential visitors to Russia as I meet them.

We had a great time both in Moscow and St Petersburg. Your travel agency was excellent in coordinating the whole trip. Everything worked like clockwork. The guides assigned to us were very nice and friendly. They had a great knowledge of their subjects. The cars and the drivers were great. The hotels were good and the itinerary was good. All in all, it was a wonderful experience. It was nice dealing with you and your company. Thank you very much for a great Russian experience. Have a great future ahead

• 31 reviews of Express to Russia Moscow Tours in Moscow

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Dailymotion

How Bits Of Asteroid Ryugu Were Shipped To NASA?

Posted: April 7, 2024 | Last updated: April 7, 2024

NASA has received samples of Asteroid Ryugu from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The samples were collected by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. Credit: NASA

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The night lights of moscow.

iss064e046345 (March 23, 2021) — The night lights of Moscow, Russia, are accented by an orbital sunset and an aurora as the International Space Station orbited 265 miles above the Ukrainian-Russian border.