All posts by Rand Simberg

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Israel Is Figuring It Out

Along the lines of my TechCentralStation column a week or two ago, Israel is starting to both realize the benefits of routine space access, and how to get it.

Regarding Israel?s vision for future military space, Eshed said MoD is pursuing multiple developments involving a low-cost satellite bus as well as myriad payloads and associated technologies aimed at deploying a constellation of small, modular satellites capable of satisfying a variety of military requirements.

In a July 30 interview, Eshed said he envisions a period not too long from now — perhaps within five years — when the Israel Air Force will be able to use fighter aircraft to launch on demand multiple satellites ranging in weight from tens of kilograms to no more than 100 kilograms.

According to this vision, MoD would hold in inventory a number of common satellite buses — each costing $10 to $12 million — whose modular payloads could be deployed for specific missions, depending on need. Ultimately, military users would have the capability to reprogram satellites for different missions through so-called smart software uplinked directly to satellites already in orbit.

“We?re looking at multi-mission systems that essentially are plug and play, and we are really serious about this. We believe that in five or 10 years, we will be able to give a full, rapid and flexible response to the multiple needs of our users,” Eshed told Space News.

Space

International Bureaucrats In Space

Jeff Foust reports that the OECD is starting to study the issue of commercial space. They’re going to study it and issue a report in a year and a half. As he points out, it’s likely to be too little, too late, and focus on trees while missing the forest.

Assuming the report is approved, the OECD will publish the report by April 2005.

There is an absence of representation by both entrepreneurial ventures and developing countries, primarily because of the high membership fees.

It?s this timescale and lack of inclusiveness that should cause the most concern about the OECD?s efforts. To get the best view of the prospects for commercial space, the project needs to take into account the plans and opinions of those small entrepreneurial ventures that largely operate under the radar of established players in commercial space, but who represent technologies and markets that hold the greatest promise for the future. These companies, in general, don?t have over $50,000 lying around to participate in such ventures, and typically lack the personnel and time required to participate at the same level as large companies and government agencies. The IFP needs to reach out to these companies and solicit their input for the project?s efforts to have the best chance of success.

Meanwhile, the drawn-out schedule of the project threatens it, if not with obsolescence, then at least with being overtaken by events in some arenas. By April 2005 it?s quite possible, for example, that suborbital space tourism will be a real industry with one or more companies offering services, based on the considerable progress made by companies like Armadillo Aerospace and Scaled Composites. Broadband satellite services offered through Ka-band satellites scheduled for launch in the next two years could prove to be a major growth sector for the satellite telecommunications office, or they might prove unable to compete with entrenched terrestrial alternatives like DSL and cable. While the IFP?s 30-year planning horizon is unlikely to make the whole report irrelevant, they will have to take care to keep up with and respond to developments in the industry in the next eighteen months.”

Yes, it’s (happily) a particularly dynamic time to be doing such an analysis.

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Ad Astra, Sans NASA

On the eve of the release of the Gehman report, Joe Katzman has a good roundup and summary of space policy links, including some that I saw this weekend but neglected to note. And they’re not good just because several of them are mine. Think of it as “Winds of Space.”

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The Last Flight

Kathy Sawyer has a long, but worth-reading description of Columbia’s last flight. It provides a hint of what will come out in the CAIB report on Tuesday.

…Don L. McCormack Jr., a senior structural engineer, gave the management team its first formal report on the foam strike: “As everyone knows, we took the hit . . . somewhere on the left wing leading edge.” The review was still going on, he told Ham, and “we’re talking about looking at what you can do, uh, in event we really have some damage there but . . .”

Ham interjected. “Hey, just a comment. I was just thinking that our flight rationale [for going ahead with launching after the foam strike in October was] that the material properties and density of the foam wouldn’t do any damage . . .” She suggested looking at that data and also the data from a 1997 flight where there had been debris damage.

McCormack agreed and noted that on the earlier mission, “we saw some fairly significant damage area” on the wing — but on the glassy ceramic tiles that cover the underside of the orbiter, not to the carbon fiber panels on the leading edge.

Returning to Columbia’s situation, Ham continued, “And really, I don’t think there is much we can do, so you know it’s not really a factor during the flight…”

Sound familiar?

And this was disturbing:

Conventional wisdom among the engineers was that the RCC, designed to withstand higher temperatures than the tiles, was also more resistant to impact damage. But they really did not know. Nobody had tested the question. This fact had been clearly noted in Boeing’s written Jan. 23 assessment of the potential damage to Columbia: “No SOFI [spray on foam insulation] on RCC test data available.”

The engineers had, in effect, been guessing. And neither Ham nor any other manager challenged the conclusion.

[Late afternoon update]

Check out this related piece from Friday’s WaPo.

Ham, the lead flight director, has been singled out by board members and others for having deflected concerns about wing damage and for having failed to investigate the adequacy of the engineering analysis because — as she told reporters July 22 — she did not feel competent to do so. “For her to say ‘I don’t have the technical competence’ is just mind-blowing,” said Perrow. “She should either have stepped down or gotten someone to train her.”

Vaughan, at Boston College, criticized Ham’s self-described effort on the seventh day of the flight to chase down rumors that some engineers wanted to get imagery of the shuttle and to remind the engineers to go through authorized channels.

“Who would speak up in an environment like that?” Vaughan said. “There is no indication that management has been trained to ask for dissenting opinion. People are often reticent to come forward when they think it contradicts what they think management wants.”

Mind blowing indeed. A lead flight director who is self-admittedly not competent to “investigate the adequacy of the engineering analysis”?

I hate to say it, but considering this was Dan Goldin’s NASA, was this disaster caused, in part, by affirmative action?

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Enabling Versus Enhancing Technologies

There’s quite a bit of discussion in this post about NASA’s role in general, and particularly in technology development.

Reader “Tristan” says that:

The two key problems of space travel have yet to be solved: inexpensive access to LEO, and a way to get around in deep space quickly. Both require high-risk, long term research to produce breakthroughs in propulsion.

While these are two key problems, the former doesn’t “require high-risk, long term research to produce breakthroughs in propulsion.” As Andrew Case points out, correctly, in a later comment:

I have to disagree with Tristan on the propulsion issue. No new breakthroughs are needed in the basic technology of propulsion. We just need to take technologies already known to work and figure out ways to make them cheaper, more efficient, and more robust. Up to a point NASA can do that, by research programs aimed at ferreting out the various ways in which rocket engines can degrade and fail. Even better is if the power of the market can be brought to bear. History shows that markets are very effective at reducing the costs associated with a given technology.

Technologists often refer to “enhancing technologies” and “enabling technologies.”

The former improve systems, in terms of cost and performance. The latter allow them to be built at all. Of course, the definitions are dependent on the context of the mission being carried out, and no technology falls purely into one box or the other, but it’s a useful distinction.

For going to Mars, enabling technologies are required to make it practical (some of which I mentioned in the linked post (e.g., nuclear propulsion, or capability to manufacture propellants from the Martian atmosphere). But for earth to orbit, it is possible to achieve dramatic cost reductions without new technology, unless you define vehicle design integration and development as a technology per se. That’s because the cause of high launch costs isn’t lack of technology, but lack of activity, and vehicles designed to be flown at a high flight rate (and such vehicles can indeed be designed with today’s materials and propulsion, but no one has made the investment to do so).

I make the distinction because it helps us prioritize NASA’s potential role. It is useful for the agency to be working on enhancing technologies, but it’s essential for them to be working on the enabling ones. That’s how the resources should be allocated, if they’re limited (as they are, of course).

NASA has been spending (and sadly, squandering) entirely too much money on launch technologies, and altogether too little on deep-space and planet-settling technologies, though the former aren’t needed as badly and can be funded by the private sector, whereas the latter are vital, with no apparent near-term payoff.