May have been made from extraterrestrial materials.
A lot of 21st-century artifacts will be, too.
Category Archives: Space
Space Futures
A new collection. I’m working on a piece with this theme for The New Atlantis, I guess I should read it.
21st Century Space Regulation
FAA-AST has been thinking about it. A lot of these are good ideas, but I disagree that their reach should be extended into orbit.
Out Of Town
I was driving up to San Francisco yesterday, and today I’m at the Foresight Vision Weekend. There was a session on longevity (including cryonics) this morning, and now there’s a panel on blockchain and it’s potential applications. One of the panelists says that one app he’s woring is with a company that wants gas stations in space. I’ll have to talk to him later.
Space Jobs
Donald Robertson has a crazy idea: Find something useful for people working SLS/Orion to do:
Presidents answer to the nation, not to local job concerns. Two presidents in a row — Bush and Obama — have tried in varying degrees to redirect NASA away from the Apollo model, only to be blocked by institutions and senators who are answerable to local NASA employees. This time, we cannot repeat Mr. Obama’s mistake of canceling the SLS without finding a future for the people who work on it.
The new “constellation” work needs to be planned and distributed in a way that will keep the traditional NASA workforce, and those who represent them, on board. Where is it written that engineers in Alabama cannot be employed building space-based tugs and modules for a lunar base? To have any chance of killing the SLS and replacing it with a useful space program, opponents need to come up with something that fulfills SLS’s political and economic purpose at least as well, while endeavoring to achieve something useful in space at the same time. That is beginning to occur, as NewSpace companies like SpaceX slowly expand beyond California and the Seattle area and increasingly employ people in Texas, Florida, and other traditional NASA states.
Encouraging this change will take a great deal of political capital and skill —the Bush administration did not deploy the former, and the Obama administration failed at the latter. So far, the Trump administration has shown little aptitude for any kind of positive relationship with Congress.
If someone does not come forward to invest the political and financial capital needed to end this conflict and move on to a more constructive vision, the United States will continue to drift in space. Resources will remain split between an increasingly successful but underfunded NewSpace industry unable to fulfill its potential, and the SLS and Orion, which the nation cannot afford to actually use. Our future in space will increasingly rely on largely self-funded efforts by people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
He says that like it’s a bad thing.
Meanwhile, NASA has incorporated its next planned boondoggle into human exploration plans.
The Russian Space Program
Its woes continue, with another Soyuz launch failure, because the Fregat fired in the wrong direction. Now probably Atlantic-stationary orbit.
But we continue to rely on them for crew to ISS, because "safety is the highest priority."
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) November 28, 2017
Here’s the story from Doug Messier.
[Afternoon update]
Meanwhile, back in the USA, NASA (and the ASAP) is still stupidly obsessing over safety.
This is nuts. Soyuz capsules aren’t armored to that MMOD requirement. As I just emailed a high-level NASA official, why don’t we just quit flying?
The SLS Mess
Jason Davis has a good rundown on it, and the implications for Europa Clipper. I don’t know how he knows this, though:
Any other rocket besides SLS—including SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon Heavy—lacks the power to blast Clipper directly from Earth to Jupiter. A conventional rocket would rely on three gravity assists from Earth and one from Venus, increasing the transit time from about 2.7 years to 7.5 years.
How does he know that? Has he run the numbers, or is he just taking NASA’s word for it? He’s also not considering the possibility of New Glenn, New Armstrong, Vulcan/ACES with a distributed launch, or BFR, all of which could be ready by 2022.
WFIRST
NASA’s next space telescope may not be executable in its current form.
As noted in comments, making it a tech demonstrator effectively puts it on the chopping block next time it overruns. I think that NASA has to start with a clean sheet of paper how such instruments should be designed and built, in the coming age of low-cost launch and space assembly.
LEDs
Replacing carbon “pollution” with light pollution. This is a much more serious problem than people realize. Most kids probably don’t even know what a dark night sky looks like.
Progress At Exos
I keep forgetting about them. It looks like they’ll be a player in suborbital soon, just not for human spaceflight. I expect I’ll see Russ and others at the suborbital research conference in Broomfield in December.