I have no idea how I will face my impending end (and I’m doing everything reasonable to put it off as long as possible), but I get meaning from my goal of moving humanity into space, and I’ll continue to do so as long as I’m alive. When I see people who win the lottery have their lives ruined over it, I suspect it’s because they don’t have any real purpose in life other than material pleasure, and have never given any serious thought to what they’d do with the winnings. I’d have no problems at all; if I had a billion dollars, I’d start a serious space venture.
Category Archives: Space
The Far Future Fund
This looks interesting. I wonder what they’re doing in terms of opening up space?
An interesting scale. https://t.co/VKZ42jPZZm
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) March 3, 2017
SpaceX Skepticism
There is a decided visceral dislike among many conservatives for Elon Musk, and this piece over at The Federalist is a veiled example. I may write a rebuttal and see if Mollie or Sean will run it.
Blue Moon
The private sector continues to seize the initiative in space:
Blue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that it could “only be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I’m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.”
Last year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company’s West Texas facility.
That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin’s feather symbol.
The company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon’s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft’s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the “water ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater’s deep crevices.”
Water is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.
If this happens, SLS/Orion are dead programs walking. This is the 21st century I’ve been waiting for. We’re finally putting a stake through the heart of the Apollo Cargo Cult.
Note (as usual with such pieces in such venues) the stupidity and ignorance of the comments.
[Update a few minutes later]
Eric Berger thinks this is a big deal. So do I. I think that people are going to be very surprised at how quickly things start happening. And I suspect that 2017 will be viewed as a very important year in space history.
[Update late morning]
Miri Kramer thinks it’s “unhinged sounding.” I think that applies better to NASA sending crew to the moon on the very first flight of SLS. Even in Apollo they had test flights of the launch system.
[Update early afternoon]
Let the space tycoons lead the way. I think the transcontinental railroad analogy is very apt. NASA’s (and the National Research Council’s) “vision,” such as it is, is indeed paltry, as I wrote last year.
Trump’s Space Policy
…is hugely wasteful and pointless.
Actually, what’s pointless is Hiltzik’s “story” (which is an op-ed). He’s stuck in the sixties, and operating under the delusion that human spaceflight is about “exploration” and “science.”
Reforming Milspace
Coyote Smith is recently retired from the Air Force, and is apparently free to be much less circumspect about his thoughts on the Air Force:
It is easy to understand why the advancement of American space power has stalled under the Air Force. For very reasonable organizational and bureaucratic reasons, space power simply cannot receive the priority it deserves inside the Air Force.
Everything else will be sacrificed for the air power mission. As a matter of culture, this is the right thing to do. Carl Builder, a RAND analyst working a project for the Air Force Chief of Staff, pointed out in the The Icarus Syndrome that space power is a competing faction that air power advocates must hold at bay. The lesson being, no matter how vital space power becomes to the nation, if it is assigned to the Air Force, or any other service or agency, it will always receive short shrift.
It’s not a new problem. We were talking about it in the eighties. But we may finally be approaching a time in which we can finally fix it. I’ll be on a panel in DC on Monday with Coyote to talk about the U. S. Space Guard.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Sort of related: The coming warbot revolution.
Redoing Apollo
Ben Panko is entirely too credulous about NASA’s lunar plans. Also, the decision to end the program was made in 1967, half a decade before the last landing.
Back To The Moon
An Apolloistic interview with Bill Posey. I really hate this sort of thing:
Going to the Moon again would be exciting, but NASA’s already-minuscule budget (a mere $18.5 billion in 2016, compared to $585 billion for the Department of Defense) means that the agency can probably only afford one big dream at a time. Do we go back to the Moon or do we press ahead on visiting Mars? Right now, Mars is winning by a landslide. For the last few years NASA has been focused on its Journey to Mars, with no plans to send people back to the Moon.
“This bill proposes not just a visit to the Moon but a presence on the lunar surface,” Casey Dreier, space policy expert at the Planetary Society, told Motherboard. “This isn’t wrong by any means, but it’s one of those things that if you do this, you just won’t go to Mars for a long time.”
In fact, if we changed course from the Journey to Mars to Journey Back to the Moon, we might not see footprints on Mars in our lifetime. “It would put us back at least a generation,” Dreier said.
a) There is, and should be, no relationship between the NASA budget and the Pentagon (or any other agency’s) budget. Each agency’s budget request has to stand on its own. And b) as usual, note the assumption that we have to choose between one destination or the other. Some people, including the so-called experts, cannot conceive of the possibility of doing both.
Also note the implicit assumption of the next question:
Motherboard: Given NASA’s already underfunded budget, do you think it would be worth abandoning a mission to Mars to go back to the Moon? [Emphasis added]
It’s a matter of prioritization, and we’ve asked NASA to prepare a roadmap of what steps they’re going to take in a timeline given current funding, for increased funding or decreased funding. What steps are you going to take to get to the Moon? They have discovered there are resources on the Moon that they can make fuel out of, you know launching from the Moon, you can see many, many reasons why it’s good to have a Moon base. And that’s part of the process of getting to Mars. It’s been awhile since we’ve been on the Moon and we’ve had some technology to catch up on and practice so those are all important.
And note the omission in the next response:
I’m excited about any private industry that plans on doing any space exploration. One time NASA came up with a series of different ideas, they would touch an asteroid, land on an asteroid, then it changed to a bigger mission and then smaller mission but there was no tie-in to a Mars mission. A lot of the private sector are ready, willing and able to explore and mine asteroids so that we don’t need to do it. Anything that you can find in the phonebook that the private sector is doing, the government doesn’t really need to be doing. Exploring an asteroid is one of those things.
Hey, Bill, did you know that the private sector is interested in mining the moon, too?
And here comes the Apolloism:
Motherboard: Do you have a special memory from working on Apollo 11 that you’d like for the next generation to experience?
What inspired me so much was President Kennedy’s speech from Rice University, that was so inspiring to me when he said we’re going to put a rocket on the Moon. I wanted to go to work on that rocket and have my fingerprints on that rocket that takes men to the Moon. So that was a big inspiration for me and I think returning to the Moon will also re-engage the public’s interest in the space program and inspire a new generation of American students to study engineering and mathematics where we currently lag behind other students in competing nations.
Motherboard: How do you see NASA handling itself as we move forward between finally choosing between going back to the Moon or going straight to Mars?
We’ve spent somewhere between $20-24 billion on what we call “missions to nowhere” and we can’t do that again. The NASA budget is now about one half of one percent [of the GDP]. During the Apollo era it was 4 percent of the GDP, I would love to see it at 1 percent. Neil deGrasse Tyson explained very well one time, space is the only thing that Congress spends money on truly to benefit the next generation, and I think that’s a true statement. I’d like to see congress spend 1 percent, I’d even like to see a constitutional amendment requiring that 1 percent be spent on human space exploration each year so that we will have the survival of our species.
With all respect to Neil Tyson (OK, I don’t have that much) it’s mindless to have an arbitrary percentage of the federal budget for anything, let alone NASA. The only way to determine how much budget NASA should get is to decide what it’s going to do, come up with a set of plans to do that, and estimate the costs. Right now, I’d say that NASA has plenty of money, or would if people like Bill Posey didn’t force it to waste money on a giant rocket and capsule that it doesn’t need, in order for him to revisit his lost youth. The three billion a year that he’s forcing the agency to spend on SLS/Orion would go a long way, perhaps all the way, both a lunar return and a Mars mission in the next decade (with public/private parterships using Commercial Cargo and Crew as a model) if NASA was allowed to spend it instead on things it actually needs to do both those things
Cislunar 1000
ULA had a workshop recently (I would have loved to attend). Paul Spudis was present, and reports.
The ASAP
…wonders why NASA is considering crewing the first flight of SLS/Orion:
In a statement at the beginning of the Feb. 23 meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), chairwoman Patricia Sanders said that if NASA decides to put a crew on the first SLS/Orion launch, Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1), it must demonstrate that there is a good reason to accept the higher risks associated with doing so.
“We strongly advise that NASA carefully and cautiously weigh the value proposition for flying crew on EM-1,” she said. “NASA should provide a compelling rationale in terms of benefits gained for accepting additional risk, and fully and transparently acknowledge the tradeoffs being made before deviating from the approach for certifying the Orion/SLS vehicle for manned spaceflight.”
“If the benefits warrant the assumption of additional risk,” she added, “we expect NASA to clearly and openly articulate their decision-making process and rationale.”
The point of my book was not that NASA should simply be more accepting of risk, or be reckless, but balance the risk against the reward. In my opinion, accelerating commercial crew would be worth the risk, to end our dependence on Russia, and increase the productivity of the ISS. Redoing Apollo 8 half a century after the original as a political stunt would not.
[Update a little before 1 PM EST]
NASA is about to have a news conference, probably in response.
[Update post conference]
It was the Bills Gerstenmaier and Hill. Gerst is always deadpan, but one had the impression that he’s not enthusiastic. They’re doing a feasibility study because the White House asked, and won’t be making any recommendations, just describing would it would take in terms of changes in schedule and budget. They just want to see “if they can fly crew sooner.” They expect to have some answers in a month or so (presumably as part of the input for FY2018 budget request). I wish the White House would ask them if they could fly crew sooner on Dragon and Starliner. That would be worth doing.
I can’t believe I just typed the words “FY 2018 budget request.” Makes me feel old.
[Update a few minutes later]
So based on expenditures to date, over ten billion per astronaut. https://t.co/rjHhji2Ats
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) February 24, 2017
[Update a few minutes later]
Here‘s Keith Cowing’s story.
[Early afternoon update]
And here‘s Eric Berger’s take.
[Update a while later]
And Joel Achenbach’s.
I’d note that the reason they would only have two crew is probably a) to reduce the number of losses if it doesn’t go well and b) more margin in the (primitive?) life support.
[Saturday-afternoon update]
Amy Shira Teitel (like me) thinks that this makes no sense.