Category Archives: Space History

Popular Culture, Space, Space History

Yuri’s Night In LA

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Griffith Observatory 7:30 – 9:00 PM
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Admission is free

Join us for a very special opportunity to join over 200 events around the world celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of humanity’s first step into the cosmos. Hear Griffith Observatory’s Astronomical Observer, Anthony Cook, describe Yuri Gagarin’s historic 108 minute orbit around the planet and how it still affects us today. Look forward to the future as Virgin Galactic CEO, George Whitesides, describes how space travel might change in the coming 50 years. Meet Yuri’s Night co-founders Loretta Hidalgo-Whitesides and George Whitesides, share your own “where were you?” stories, and take part in this historic, global celebration of people in space.

Wood and Vine 9:00pm – 11:30pm
6280 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

[Via Robin Snelson]

Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Anniversaries

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Jeff Foust, Doug Messier and Clark Lindsey are on a panel discussing the Gagarin (fifty years on Tuesday), Dennis Tito (ten years) and Shuttle (thirty years on Tuesday) anniversaries, and where we’re going from here.

Doug Messier noting that Roscosmos will have a new director next week. The current one was fired about a week before the Gagarin anniversary.

Clark talking about Ice Age, Thaw, and New Spring. Need to get evolutionary process going, using example of early automotive age with lots of companies fighting with most efficient designs, but happens in an evolutionary manner. Plants need heat, technologies need funding. By Apollo 17, things had gotten frozen in space, including attitudes (space is expensive and always will be, and only government can do it).

Started to see attitudes thaw in the nineties, little projects started popping up to address the new markets of LEO comsats, then transitioned into tourism with the new century. Starting to see thriving diversity. Expects to see multiple competing designs that will prove out which is the best for which applications and who has the lowest operating cost. Will start to get feedback and change the public mindset about space, that will in turn help bring in investment. Sees hopeful next decade.

Institutions were frozen as well — had gotten locked into Big Project mode by Apollo. For military ELVs were good enough, same thing for comsats. Slow evolution, very little money going into vehicle developments, other than incremental improvements. Shuttle was worst of all worlds, because reduced budget, but increase requirements, so got a hybrid of a system that was horrifically expensive to operate.

Jeff Foust more pessimistic about the future of government human spaceflight. Current policy situation more discombobulated than at any time in the past fifty years. Always knew what next project was going to be, but don’t have that clear of a future right now, because don’t know what the Space Launch System is. Several factors — lost the impetus that drove it initially (Cold War), which ended two decades ago but had so much momentum that it has continued to shape policy since, but ISS is complete, Shuttle is retiring, and the momentum has dissipated. Attempts to turn China into the new nemesis haven’t worked out very well, because they’re not in any particular hurry. It’s been two and a half years since their most recent manned launch. Trying to come up with rationale for why do human spaceflight, and are some compelling reasons (Augustine panel tried to describe them) but hard to communicate to the public. Thinks that there is still a possibility of business as usual, except for the fiscal situation. We are going to see significant changes in space spending, recalling talk that Charles Miller gave a couple years ago about OMB cuts, even before TARP and bailouts. Federal spending across the board will be scrutinized, and non-defense discretionary will be a major target. All these factors lead to a closing window for any kind of recognizable government human spaceflight program, of not more than ten years. Will keep ISS operating until 2020, but if a lot will happen between now and then to cause us to reconsider any activities beyond that.

What does this mean for commercial?

It means it might be the only game in town. Suborbital ventures making steady but slow progress, but will see them develop and perhaps evolve into orbital. Moon and points beyond LEO out of reach of current commercial, but CCDev, COTS may be the shock needed for government encouragement of commercial LEO human spaceflight. Time to rethink how to get the government and commercial sectors to work together for affordable and sustainable infrastructure that can support both government and commercial users. Infrastructure not a sexy term, but a very necessary one, so if we can get it into place, we can get people to see sufficient value in human spaceflight to continue to fund it. Opportunity, but it won’t last long, but it will require innovative thinking and breaking old paradigms.

Messier more upbeat, thinks that these infrastructural items will come to pass. Looking back to the fifties, there were high entry costs into the field, with big investments in tech development and infrastructure. NASA has enormous infrastructure that’s costly to build, maintain, and we’re discovering now to repair. There is a model for doing this in the Middle East, in the United Arab Emirates. Branson has shown the way in Dubai, with a government investment house buying access to suborbital space. XCOR has similar deals going in other countries. Bigelow has similar ideas, including working with the emirates. Future will see commercial provision of training from NASTAR, launch on commercial vehicles, using commercial orbital facilities — will go where the money is. China is rising, India and Brazil could be launching next year in cooperation with the Ukraine, and will transition from billionaires with dreams to institutional investors. With reusable vehicles, we’ll be able to launch from almost anywhere, for suborbital first and eventually orbital. Sees a future with mix of traditional and new spaceports, at least during transition. We get there by starting to fly. A lot of projects and talk, but not a lot of flights. It’s been seven years since Scaled Composites first flew SS1 suborbital, and six and a half since the last time, and it’s taken longer than we hoped. Orbital projects are feasible, once we get the transportation. Have to get commercial orbital transportation to and from facilities, and then they’ll proceed accordingly.

Challenge: hubris — don’t over promise, and don’t try to go too far too fast. Leap from SpaceShipOne to SpaceShipTwo may have been too big. Same may apply from Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy. Don’t know much about reliability of vehicle with only two flights under their belt. Potential for next ten to fifteen years is a complete change from the way we’ve done space since the Cold War and if so it will be very exciting.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Ronald Reagan’s Space Legacy

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Mark Whittington has an essay on it, but he misses the biggest part of it — the creation of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (now FAA-AST), which enabled the development of the commercial spaceflight industry, as I described when Reagan died in 2004.

And, Mark, please stop demonstrating your profound ignorance of the meaning of the word “subsidy.” COTS and Commercial Crew are not subsidies.

History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Space Stasis

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Thoughts from Neil Stephenson on how we got stuck with our current space transportation schemes. It’s unclear, though, what he means when he says “rockets,” or what different directions wold be fruitful. If he means “expendable launchers,” then yes, we need to break out, and start building space transports. But those are still “rockets.”

[Update a while later]


Thoughts on the development of reusable vehicles from Clark Lindsey.

History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Eight Years Ago Today

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Columbia was torn apart in a plasma hurricane over an early-morning Texas sky, with seven crew aboard.

My immediate thoughts were recorded here for posterity. Some thought them heartless, but I disagreed.

That event precipitated the recent chaos in space policy, because the Bush administration made a commitment to end the Shuttle program last year (though it has been extended into this one) without a realistic plan for replacing it. The Obama administration came up with one last year, but the porkers in Congress insist on continuing to waste money on dedicated NASA solutions that will almost certainly never fly. But this will all have to come to a head, in months if not weeks, when the fiscal reality finally hits NASA along with the rest of the federal government.

I had more thoughts a little later on the flight director’s dilemma.

Here’s a haiku contest I hosted shortly afterward on the subject.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note, here’s a golden oldie from that era about the hypersensitive left:

Leftist Groups Decry NASA Demonization

February 5, 2003

HOUSTON, Texas, USA (APUPI)

A number of progressive, liberal, and socialist organizations have banded together to protest the latest slanderous attack on them, and their noble unquestionable principles, this time by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Some of the more prominent groups include Postmodernists for Peace, the World People’s Liberation Front, the Liberation Front Of The People of the World, Socialists International, the American Communist Party, International ANSWER, Stalinists for Trotsky, Trotskyites for Chomsky, the NAALPOC (National Association for the Advancement of Liberal People Of Color), the ACLU, and the Green and Democratic parties.

In a press conference in Clear Lake City, outside the front gates of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Emilio Litella, the spokesman for the newly formed “Coalition For Social Justice And Leftist Anti-Defamation” complained that even before the investigation into the Columbia disaster was completed, they were being blamed for it.

“NASA has already started to leak rumors that it was caused by the left wing,” he said. “Once again, we’re being unfairly libeled by reactionary conservatives with an anti-human, anti-peace agenda. It’s obvious that this is part of an ongoing effort by right-wing baby-killing pencil-necked geeks to demonize all progressive forces, just as our pro-peace, no-war-for-oil message is starting to resonate with the American people, on the eve of a brutal and unjust war on the people of Iraq and Palestine.”

In Washington, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a noted expert on demonization of progressive forces by the conservative media, was asked if the Democrats agreed with this complaint.

In a soft, pained, reasonable-sounding-yet-whiny voice, he replied, “Well, I have to say that I’m very disappointed at this rush to judgement on the part of the space agency. They claim to be objective, and that they aren’t going to say anything definitive until the investigation is complete, but anyone who reads the papers knows the direction that the investigation has been going.”

“Then shrill voices on talk radio and the internet pick it up, and make it sound as though those of us who are for truly compassionate policies, and are against tax cuts for the rich, are responsible for the destruction of the space shuttle. It’s just a continuation of the politics of personal destruction.”

“I and my family have received several death threats about this in the past hour alone, and that’s not even considering the normal daily ones from Bob Torricelli and Jim Jeffords. That was most disappointing.”

Senator Hillary Clinton, who happened to be in Mr. Daschle’s office measuring the draperies, added, “It’s just part of the ongoing vast, right-wing conspiracy against me and my husband, that I still wish that some enterprising reporter would go and dig up the real story on, instead of tarring voices for fairness with innuendo about blowing up space shuttles.”

When asked if she had ever had any involvement with the nation’s space program, she replied, “Well, I did want to be an astronaut, before I went through the period when I wanted to be a Marine, but the reactionary neanderthal rat-bastards at the space agency told me that girls need not apply. But other than that, I’m afraid I don’t recall.”

Back in Clear Lake, following the press conference, in response to queries, Kent Lovebreed, a crewcut spokesman from NASA’s Public Affairs Office, responded, “We regret that anyone feels that they’re under personal attack by our critical investigation into the cause of Saturday’s tragedy. We wouldn’t want to imply that there is anything sinister here. We are simply objective scientists and engineers, gathering the evidence, and following the trail wherever it leads. Right now, unfortunately, the left wing has to be considered the leading cause of that catastrophe.”

Asked if, as a result of the preliminary results of the investigation, NASA was considering laying down a design requirement that all future space vehicles have only right wings, he said, “It’s premature to make any kind of recommendation like that, but in light of our experience now, it certainly has to be one of the options on the table.”

[Copyright 2003 by Rand Simberg]

Some things never change.

[Update late afternoon]

Clark Lindsey has collected some more links.

Space, Space History

Ad Astra Per Ardua

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Nine years ago I recalled the sixteenth anniversary of the Challenger loss:

Sixteen years ago today, I was sitting in a meeting at the Rockwell Space Transportation Systems Division in Downey, California. It was a status review meeting for a contract on which I was working, called the Space Transportation Architecture Study. It was a joint NASA/USAF contract, and its ostensible purpose was to determine what kind of new launch systems should replace or complement the Space Shuttle. Its real purpose was to try to get the Air Force and NASA Marshall to learn how to play together nicely and stop squabbling over turf and vehicle designs (it failed).

It was a large meeting, with many people in attendance from El Segundo and Colorado Springs (Air Force) and Houston, Huntsville and the Cape (NASA) as well as many Rockwell attendees.

As I sat there, waiting for the meeting to begin, one of my colleagues came running into the room, his face white as a freshly-bleached bedsheet. He leaned over and told me and others, in an insistent sotto voce, “I just saw the Challenger blow up.”

We stared at him in momentary disbelief.

“I’m serious. I just came from the mission control center. It just exploded about a minute after launch.”

One could actually see the news travel across the large meeting room as expressions of early-morning torpor transformed into incredulity and shock. More than most people, even with no more information than the above, we understood the implications. While there was speculation in the media all morning that the crew might be saved, we knew instantly that they were lost. We knew also that we had lost a quarter of the Shuttle fleet, with a replacement cost of a couple billion dollars and several years, and that there would be no flights for a long time, until we understood what had happened.

The ironic purpose of our meeting became at once more significant and utterly meaningless. Most of the NASA people immediately made arrangements to fly back to Houston, Huntsville and the Cape, and we held the session without them, in a perfunctory manner.

This was one of those events, like the more recent one in September, that is indelibly etched into memory–where you were, what you were doing, what you were feeling. I’m curious about any inputs from others, either in comments here or email.

Oh, and I should note that it’s an easy date to remember for me–it was (and remains still) the anniversary of my date of birth…

It’s kind of amazing that I’m coming up on the tenth anniversary (this coming fall) of the birth of this blog.

[Update a few minutes later]

Clark Lindsey has some 25th anniversary links, and NASA Watch is all about the anniversary today.

History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Forty Four Years

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I remember very well the Apollo I fire and the loss of Grissom, Chafee and White. It was the day before my birthday, and it was a shock to the nation. But it was different than the later losses of Challenger (a quarter of a century ago tomorrow) and Columbia (seven years on Monday), because they were Cold-War warriors, and, unlike today’s human spaceflight program, what they were doing was important to the nation. So instead of shutting things down for years, as we did with the Shuttle each time, they overhauled the management at the contractor (even though it was really NASA’s fault) and a little less than two years later, we had sent men around the moon, and won the space race.