Cutting Edge

Amid work to ready NASA's Ares I-X rocket for a long-awaited test flight next week, a presidential panel charged with reviewing the nation's manned space program submitted its completed report Thursday, concluding NASA's planned shuttle replacement will cost too much and take too long to build to be a viable option.

Even so, panel members said they looked forward to the $445 million test flight Tuesday and the data it will generate to help validate computer models and processes that will be useful in any future rocket design efforts.

"We do think it's appropriate to fly the Ares I-X," said Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin and chairman of the U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee. "We think there are important things to be learned that will help the program."

Norman Augustine, left, chairman of a presidential review of manned space options, and panel member Edward Crawley, right, brief reporters Thursday.

(Credit: NASA)

The panel's completed report contained no major surprises--an executive summary was released in late September that included the same five basic options for future manned space activity--but the coincidental timing of the report and next week's test flight highlighted the uncertain future of NASA's plans to replace the space shuttle and return to the moon.

"The premier conclusion of the committee is the human spaceflight program the United States is currently pursuing is one that's on an unsustainable trajectory," said Augustine. "We say that because of a mismatch between the scope of the program and the funds to support the program. That's of great concern to us because human spaceflight, where safety accounts for everything, is a very unforgiving sort of pursuit."

In the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster, the Bush administration ordered NASA to finish the International Space Station and retire the shuttle by the end of 2010, and to develop new rockets and spacecraft to return astronauts to the moon by the early 2020s.

The plan NASA developed--the Constellation program--calls for a new rocket known as the Ares I, and an Apollo-like crew capsule called Orion, to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit. A large, unmanned heavy lift rocket known as the Ares V then would be built to launch Orion capsules and lunar landers to the moon.

President Obama expressed general support for the Constellation program during the presidential campaign, but earlier this year he ordered an independent review of NASA's manned space program in the context of the current budget environment. At the same time, the Office of Management and Budget cut some $3 billion from NASA's projected "out-years" budget, money earmarked for development of the Ares V.

Against that uncertain backdrop, NASA pressed ahead with development of the Orion capsule and the Ares I booster envisioned as a replacement for the space shuttle. The new rocket features an extended shuttle solid-fuel booster, a hydrogen-fueled upper stage and an escape rocket that could pull the crew capsule to safety in an emergency.

NASA plans to launch a test version of the rocket Tuesday on a sub-orbital flight to verify computer models being developed to help design the Ares I. For the test flight, a standard four-segment shuttle booster is being used, along with a dummy upper stage and an Orion capsule simulator that duplicate the mass and shape of the Ares I rocket.

"We've reviewed the Ares I and Orion elements of that program, which are the two parts that are principally underway," Augustine said Thursday. "We found those programs to be reasonably well managed, we found them to have technical problems of a nature that's probably not uncommon for complex undertakings of this type.

"It's our belief that given ample time and funds, the engineers at NASA and their contractors are certainly capable of solving those problems. So we think the program within itself has a very good likelihood of succeeding. The issue that comes up under Ares I is whether the program is useful when it has succeeded because of a mismatch of the time schedules and the costs with what will be needed for it to do."

While that observation suggests Augustine and the panel do not support continued development of Ares I, panel member Leroy Chiao, a former astronaut, said "it's important to emphasize that we were presenting options, not recommendations."

"Despite what's been going on in the blogosphere, the panel didn't come up saying (NASA) should cancel Ares I, which a lot of people think we actually did," he said in a telephone interview. "It's really up to the decision makers as to which path to go down. So Ares I is not dead by a long shot."

NASA believes the Ares I could be ready to fly by 2015. The Augustine panel concluded it would take until at least 2017 to complete the work, coming on line too late to provide more than token support to the International Space Station. In the meantime, NASA will be forced to buy seats on Russian Soyuz rockets, at $50 million per ticket, to get U.S. astronauts to and from the lab complex.

The Augustine report also concluded that NASA will be unable to extend human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit without additional funding, suggesting an additional $3 billion per year, plus a hedge against inflation, to fund a realistic space exploration program.

The panel did not make recommendations, but members seem to favor a commercially developed launch system to get astronauts to low-Earth orbit and a government-developed heavy lift rocket to extend human exploration to the moon and beyond.

The so-called "flexible path" option presented by the Augustine panel would allow NASA to launch orbital moon missions and even flights around Mars or to its moons by the early to mid 2020s, while long-term development of landers and associated hardware is developed in parallel.

"The current plan focuses on going to the moon (with) the longer term goal of going to Mars," Augustine said. "There are a lot of things one could do along the way that are very interesting, that let you build up gradually to the immense undertaking of the Mars program.

"The sort of thing we're thinking of, one could fly circumlunar missions, you could circumnavigate Mars, you could land on an asteroid, a near-Earth object, you could land on Phobos or Deimos, the martian moons, and do some very exciting science from there. It seems to us that is a more sensible program than to wait 15 years or so for the first major event."

A White House spokesman thanked the panel for its report, saying "the president has on numerous occasions confirmed his commitment to human space exploration, and the goal of ensuring that the nation is on a vigorous and sustainable path to achieving our boldest aspirations in space."

"Against a backdrop of serious challenges with the existing program, the Augustine committee has offered several key findings and a range of options for how the nation might improve its future human space flight activities," he said. "We will be reviewing the committee's analysis, and then ultimately the president will be making the final decisions."

Eolas Technologies, a company that ground through a years-long patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft, now has sued a large swath of corporate powers for infringement of that same patent and another related patent concerning interactive programs on Web sites.

The list of defendants includes many high-profile companies inside and outside the tech world: Adobe Systems, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube.

Eolas' suit is not to be taken lightly. Although the earlier Microsoft case took many years to resolve, and Eolas by no means won a complete victory, the patent involved did overall withstand heavy legal challenges despite many on the Web rallying to Microsoft's aid. Microsoft and Eolas won't describe terms of their 2007 settlement of the patent case, but Eolas did say it expected to pay its shareholders a 2007 dividend afterward.

"What distinguishes this case from most patent suits is that so many established companies named as defendants are infringing a patent that has been ruled valid by the Patent Office on three occasions," said Mike McKool, head of the national law firm McKool Smith and Eolas' lead attorney.

This diagram shows one example of the newly granted Eolas patent 7,599,985 in use.

(Credit: Eolas)

The U.S. District Court suit, filed in the eastern district of Texas, seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions prohibiting the plaintiffs from using the patented technology; payment for damages from infringement, including treble damages because the alleged infringement was willful; attorney's fees; and a jury trial.

Eolas conducts research and development but also has a separate licensing department. "Eolas seeks to return value to its shareholders by commercializing these technologies through strategic alliances, licensing and spin-offs," the company says of itself.

The earlier Microsoft case involved U.S. patent 5,838,906, "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document," which involved browsers launching a helper application such as Adobe Flash.

In the new case, that patent is joined by a newer one granted Tuesday, No., 7,599,985, with a very similar title: "Distributed hypermedia method and system for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document."

"The '985 Patent is a continuation of the '906 patent, and allows Web sites to add fully-interactive embedded applications to their online offerings through the use of plug-in and Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web development techniques," Eolas said in a statement about the lawsuit.

Ajax caught on midway through the decade as a way to endow Web pages with interactive features based in part on the JavaScript programming language. Ajax is used in many Web sites including Google Maps and Yahoo Mail.

The '985 patent, originally filed Aug. 9, 2002, involves a program embedded in a Web page--or "hypermedia document," as the patent language calls it more generally. Here's an excerpt from the patent abstract's description of the technology:

A system allowing user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia to access and execute an embedded programming object. The program object is embedded into a hypermedia document much like data objects.

The user may select the program object from the screen. Once selected the program executes on the user's (client's) computer or may execute on a remote server or additional remote computers in a distributed processing arrangement.

After launching the program object, the user is able to interact with the object as the invention provides for ongoing interprocess communication between the application object (program) and the browser program.

And later, in a bit more detail:

The present invention allows a user at a client computer connected to a network to locate, retrieve, and manipulate objects in an interactive way. The invention not only allows the user to use a hypermedia format to locate and retrieve program objects, but also allows the user to interact with an application program located at a remote computer.

Interprocess communication between the hypermedia browser and the embedded application program is ongoing after the program object has been launched. The use is able to use a vast amount of computing power beyond that which is contained in the user's client computer.

Apple, Google, Yahoo, Texas Instruments, and Office Depot each declined to comment on the suit. Staples, Playboy, Sun, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Adobe, and Perot Systems didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Elizabeth Driscoll, vice president of public relations for Go Daddy, said in a statement, "We have not seen the lawsuit and, therefore, cannot comment on it. However, we are unaware of the basis for any such claims and we will defend the case vigorously."

Updated 1:26 p.m., 2:09 p.m., 2:35 p.m., and 4:08 p.m. PDT with comment from companies.

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--A presidential panel wrapping up a review of future U.S. manned space flight options delivered a grim assessment Wednesday, showing NASA's current plan to retire the shuttle, finish the space station and return to the moon by the early 2020s is not remotely feasible without a significant restoration of previously cut funding.

In the absence of a major spending increase, "our view is that it will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in the human spaceflight area," said Norman Augustine, chairman of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee.

Augustine's committee was set up by the Obama administration to examine NASA's current plans for retiring the shuttle, completing the space station, and returning to the moon as well as alternative strategies for moving beyond low-Earth orbit.

Anticipated funding versus currently planned budget - a $3 billion annual shortfall - threatens NASA's planned return to the moon by the early 2020s.

(Credit: NASA)

The committee also is assessing how long NASA and its partners should operate the International Space Station. NASA currently has no money in its projected downstream budget to operate the $100 billion lab complex beyond 2015.

The Augustine committee believes the station cannot be operated without direct U.S. mission control and management and that it will cost some $1.5 billion to safely drive the huge complex out of orbit at the end of its life, whenever that might be.

NASA's current long-range plan, developed by the Bush administration in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster, is to complete the space station, retire the shuttle fleet, and develop a Apollo-like Orion crew capsule that will be launched to the station by new Ares 1 rockets.

During the gap between shuttle operations and the debut of Ares-1/Orion, U.S. astronauts will have to hitch rides to the station aboard Russian Soyuz rockets. NASA managers have assumed all along the station program would be extended and Ares 1/Orion would be used to deliver crews and supplies.

NASA also plans to develop a huge new unmanned heavy lift rocket called the Ares 5 that eventually will boost Orion capsules and Altair lunar landers to the moon for long-duration exploration. The Orion capsule, Ares rockets and lunar landers are the central pieces in NASA's Constellation program.

But during a final public hearing Wednesday in Washington, the Augustine panel provided a sobering look at NASA's projected budget and the requirements of various manned space flight scenarios.

Considering the Constellation program as the "program of record," panel member and former astronaut Sally Ride said NASA would need an additional $50 billion or so through 2020 to implement the program as currently planned. This scenario is known as the "unconstrained budget" case.

Former astronaut Sally Ride confers with manned space committee Chairman Norman Augustine before the start of a final public hearing Wednesday in Washington.

(Credit: NASA)

It assumes the shuttle is retired on schedule and that the space station is deorbited in early 2016, an option no one on the panel seems to favor. In that scenario, the new Orion/Ares 1 system would have no destination until the Ares 5 heavy lifter debuted and moon flights began after 2021.

"In the unconstrained budget, Orion and Ares 1 arrive shortly after ISS is deorbited," Ride said. "And then you get human lunar return in 2021."

Assuming NASA is forced to live within the 2010 budget guidelines provided by the Obama administration, the Ares 5 heavy lift moon rocket would not be ready until the 2028 timeframe.

The Obama administration's fiscal 2010 NASA budget request includes $630 million in additional near-term funding for development of follow-on rockets and spacecraft needed for the agency's post-shuttle moon program, officials said Thursday. But most of the increase is from the administration's economic stimulus package, and projections through 2013 show a $3.1 billion reduction in overall funding for the program compared with 2009 projections.

Unveiling NASA's $18.7 billion 2010 budget on Thursday, acting Administrator Chris Scolese said the Obama administration had ordered an independent review of NASA's plans to replace the space shuttle with a combination of manned and unmanned Ares rockets, Apollo-style Orion capsules, and lunar landers needed to establish research stations on the moon by the early 2020s. The new rockets are the central elements of what NASA calls the Constellation program.

"You can expect a new administration coming in wants to understand where we're at, and is this the best way to go forward," Scolese said. "That's the purpose of the review, to understand that. Clearly if we're on the wrong path we should change. If you're asking me, 'Do I think we're on the wrong path,' no, I don't. We need to go off and demonstrate that. The review team needs to look at it and understand what we're doing and offer suggestions on how we could do it better."

A concept image showing NASA's Ares 1 rocket taking off.

(Credit: NASA)

The review is expected to be completed by August. In the meantime, NASA will continue work on the Ares 1 rocket and Orion capsules the agency hopes to begin flying in March 2015. But contracts needed for initial development of the unmanned Ares 5 heavy lift booster needed for NASA's planned return to the moon are on hold pending the results of the review.

NASA's $18.7 billion budget request includes $1 billion in Recovery Act money and funds the addition of one shuttle flight to deliver an already-built physics experiment to the International Space Station.

Including next week's launch of the shuttle Atlantis on a fifth and final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA plans nine more shuttle flights through September 30, 2010, the end of the fiscal year. If one or two flights slip beyond that target, NASA will need additional funding but the Obama administration has indicated it would support such a request if needed.

"What does this budget represent? I was surprised, in the last month I've seen the president three times," Scolese told reporters Thursday. "And I think that's an indication that NASA is something that this administration really cares about. The fact that we were highlighted in the budget discussions today with the (president's) science adviser is another indication of that. And I think you see it in this first bullet here, a $630 million increase to exploration, a $456 million increase to science and a $264 million increase to aeronautics. Those are significant increases."

Even so, the picture is much less rosy in the out years. Projections through 2013 in the fiscal 2010 budget package feature an asterisk after totals for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate responsible for space station operations and development of the Constellation program.

The asterisks mean those numbers may change based on the results of the upcoming manned spaceflight review. But as of this writing, exploration faces $3.1 billion in cuts through 2013.

"We're up this year and next by about $630 million," agreed Douglas Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. "Over that time period, it's down about $3.1 (billion)."

Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said in a recent speech the projected funding shortfalls threaten America's leadership in manned space flight.

"In the last five years two presidents and two Congresses have provided the top-level direction necessary to ensure that the root cause of Columbia's loss--the lack of a guiding strategic vision for NASA--never happens again," Griffin said. "But apparently something more is needed. We're not matching the words with the necessary actions at the staff level. How soon we forget.

"Let me be clear. In a democracy, the proper purpose of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget) is not to find a way to create a Potemkin Village at NASA. It is not to create the appearance of having a real space program without having to pay for it. It is not to specify to NASA how much money shall be allocated for human lunar return by 2020. The proper purpose of the OMB is to work with NASA, as a partner in good government, to craft carefully vetted estimates of what is required to achieve national policy goals. The judgment as to whether the stated goals are too costly, or not, is one to be made by the nation's elected leadership, not career civil service staff."

Griffin said "no one can wrest leadership in space from the United States. We're that good. But we can certainly cede it, and that is the path we are on."

Sen. Bill Nelson, (D-Fla.), said he believes President Obama understands the value of space exploration and "I believe that's why the president has committed to finishing all nine space shuttle missions, regardless of how long it takes; and, to make full use of the International Space Station."

"This is a step in the right direction," he said. "But down the road the administration's budget does not match what candidate Obama said about the future of our space program. Still, he's assured me these numbers are subject to change, pending a review he has ordered of NASA."

A longer version of this story is available on the CBS News Space Place web site.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--It only took a few years for the science of information retrieval to move from an obscure academic niche to the secretive research departments at the heart of multibillion-dollar Internet companies.

But one of those companies, Yahoo, is trying to give a little more power back to the professors and grad students through a program called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). The service lets academics and start-ups build their own search sites around Yahoo's search engine for free, manipulating results however they want.

Two dozen researchers and students from Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, and other universities met here at Yahoo for a day in September to hear the company's BOSS pitch, show off some ideas they've had for how to use it, and try to coax Yahoo into sharing even more information through BOSS. Overall, their response to Yahoo's program was favorable.

MIT's Harr Chen would love even more data from Yahoo.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

"It enables a lot of research that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do," said Harr Chen, an MIT researcher at the event.

If it works out as hoped, Yahoo will make some money out of the program: corporate users who reach large scale with BOSS will have to show Yahoo's search ads. The academic side is a step removed from direct revenue, instead giving Yahoo some prominence with potentially influential thinkers in a market Google dominates. Piquing the interest of researchers at universities with a reputation for incubating the next big ideas is smart, though, and Yahoo and Google themselves both grew out of Stanford.

And honestly, with Google hogging 63 percent of the U.S. search market to Yahoo's 19.6 percent, what does Yahoo have to lose?

"We're not a market leader," said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search. "From a strategic standpoint, it does make sense to let other people innovate on top of us. If the pie grows, our share of the pie grows at the expense of somebody else."

The ultimate hope is that BOSS will mean money, too.

Yahoo has made the investment in a massive infrastructure that constantly scans and re-indexes the Web, filters out some of the dreck, interprets search queries, and provides search results in high volume in very short order. This infrastructure is prohibitively expensive for start-ups, just as it is for academic researchers, so Yahoo is letting companies use BOSS as well. Those operating on a small scale may use BOSS for free, but Yahoo requires larger efforts to either show ads or sign a custom revenue-sharing deal.

Mashing up Yahoo results
One possibility for BOSS is that Yahoo's search results can be combined with other data sets. "Other parties may have more info about their users," said BOSS engineer Vik Singh. For example, a social-networking site can track movies or the activities of friends that could be useful in shaping search results. "This is stuff we may or may not have," Singh said.

Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Chengxiang Zhai and Bin Tan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign showed one example of BOSS in action that uses this idea of modifying Yahoo's search results. Their application steered Yahoo's search engine in particular directions based on the data stored on a user's own computer.

In the example, the computer was able to discern what type of jaguar the user was more likely to be looking for--the cat, not the car, or the version of Mac OS X--based on evidence on the computer.

"We believe the client side of personalization has a few advantages over the server side," Zhai said. "It can alleviate concern over privacy and it can provide more information about user activity. And it can naturally distribute computation," so a search company's machines share work with the user's own computer.

Qualitatively different
Researchers could investigate search and related technologies such as natural-language processing (NLP) without BOSS. But with it, that research is vaulted into a different domain. It isn't just a matter of taking more time; with BOSS's vast index of the Web, the possibilities are qualitatively different.

"You gain enormously from access to the data. There are all sorts of things you can do with tons of data" that you can't with a smaller set, said Stanford's Christopher Manning.

Manning works in the active field of natural-language processing, technology that aims to let computers discern the meaning of real human speech or text and that's behind search technology from search start-up Hakia and Microsoft-acquired PowerSet. NLP benefits tremendously from having large-scale data sources, Manning said.

"To understand what words mean, you look at how they're used. We do that on a large scale, (examining) usage and context to learn about meaning," Manning said.

Please, sir, I want some more
It also was clear the researchers' appetites were whetted by BOSS. Nobody sounded ungrateful, but heck, as long as Yahoo is sharing some important data, why not share a little more?

Yahoo is headed that direction. On the research day, it opened up access to another slice of search-related "prisma" data.

Vik Singh, an engineer behind Yahoo BOSS

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Prisma powers Yahoo's search assist feature that suggests searches based on what people have begun to type into the search box, which can make searching more convenient for users, but for researchers trying to build more technology atop Yahoo search results, prisma data is bigger than that. For example, it can show a search term's variations, its membership in categories such as place names, movies, and government, and the likelihood that people search for the term by itself or as part of a larger query.

"That's got a lot of potential," said Dan Ramage a natural-language processing Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. Ramage said BOSS is useful for his research, which focuses on determining the various relationships that can connect a pair of words, he said, but he'd like it better if he could get better control over the snippets of text Yahoo shows with its search results.

Yes, Yahoo will share more
Yahoo plans to release more. "Over time you'll see we'll offer a lot more ingredients, a lot more power," said Ashim Chhabra, senior product manager with the BOSS project.

Some researchers are hungry for as much as they can get. Chen, for example, hoped Yahoo could become an engine to run software supplied by researchers that plumbs its entire Web index.

"We give you a little code, you run that code on every document, then you give us a number," Chen suggested. It would be useful, for example, "to track evolution of themes and memes on the Web, different buzz trends."

Graham Mudd, product marketing manager for Yahoo search, said the idea is "not as crazy as you think," though he also gave the impression that researchers shouldn't hold their breath for that level of access. But Yahoo clearly wants to offer what he could.

When it comes to search research, "The pool of talent is divided between a half a dozen companies," Raghavan said. "We think it behooves us to open up."

NASA's plans to launch new manned missions to the International Space Station three years after the space shuttle retires in 2010 aren't panning out.

Officials at the space agency said Monday that they will still hold to their word that the Constellation program--a mission of the newly developed Ares 1 rocket and Orion crew capsule to the ISS--will happen by March 2015, five years after the space shuttle program shuts down. But a previous goal of an early launch in 2013 has now been moved to 2014 because of budget constraints. NASA officials are also leaving wiggle room there.

"Since the program's inception, NASA has been working an aggressive plan to achieve flight capability before our March 2015 target," Rick Gilbrech, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA, said in statement. "We are still confident the Constellation Program will make its first flight to the International Space Station on or before that date."

Also on Monday, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel expressed concerns about the funding of the Constellation program in its 2007 annual report. Among the worries were the "slow pace at which some NASA headquarters decisions are implemented across the 10 NASA centers," it said.