Category Archives: Space

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

The Static Fire Of The First Core Stage To Be Reflown

28 Comments

…is complete. This will be a big week for SpaceX if they get the launch off successfully on Thursday.

[Update a few minutes later]

Meanwhile, while SpaceX is driving down launch costs, a new report is out on the insane program costs of SLS/Orion.

[Update on Wednesday afternoon]

Bob Zimmerman responds to media criticism of his report.

[Bumped]

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

The National Space Council

2 Comments

A brief history.

I don’t know whether or not it will help with the current policy mess. It probably partly depends on who heads it up (that is, the real day-to-day work, not Pence).

This is strange:

According to historians, in 1992, council staff convinced Bush to fire the NASA chief because they thought he would resist their ideas. As is the case in many bureaucratic environments, the dysfunction of the council had little do with national interest or policy, but with office politics.

Truly wasn’t fired because the council staff “thought he would resist their ideas.” He was fired because he was actively sabotaging Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative, and actually having his AA for legislative affairs lobby against it on the Hill.

[Update a while later]

Stephen Smith has a blog post on the (meaningless) NASA authorization ceremony last week. Trump seems remarkably uninformed, but that’s true of most subjects, I think.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Jeff Kluger says that magical thinking won’t get you to Mars. But a) this isn’t an appropriation and b) he seems to think that we can do Apollo again.

Business, Health, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

NAD+

15 Comments

Reversing aging in mice:

In the latest paper, the scientists revealed new details on how NAD+ works to keep cells young. Sinclair put drops of NAD+ into the water of a group of mice, and within a couple of hours, their NAD+ levels started to rise. Within the first week, the scientists saw obvious age reversal in muscle and improvements in DNA repair. “We can’t tell the difference between the tissues from an old mouse that is two years old versus a young mouse that is three to four months old,” Sinclair says.

I’ve started taking it myself. And this is interesting, too:

“The idea is to protect the body from radiation exposure here on earth, either naturally occurring or doctor-inflicted,” he says. “If I were going to have an X-ray or a CT scan, I would take NMN beforehand.” He already has plans to go even farther than earth: NASA is collaborating with Sinclair’s group on the human tests to see if it’s possible to insulate astronauts from the effects of cosmic radiation in space.

That would be nice.

[Sunday-afternoon update]

This looks like a promising similar breakthrough.

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Living In Space

15 Comments

Things you’re not allowed to do.

a) I find it difficult to believe that no one in the past several decades, especially with women in the mix since the early 80s, has not joined the 150-mile club. They even flew a married couple in the early 90s. Shuttle had very sensitive accelerometers, and I imagine ISS does too. Mission control knows what’s going on.

b) I also find it difficult to believe that anyplace with engineers and scientists and sugar doesn’t have hooch in short order. The free fall might make the fermentation an interesting process, but I’ll bet it’s been happening.

These are things that are against the rules, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The First Falcon Reflight

19 Comments

It may happen this month. Eric Berger has the story. But this seems just wrong for the 21st century:

it can occur no earlier than March 29, because the launch of an Atlas V rocket has slipped to March 27, and it requires about 48 hours for the Air Force to reconfigure its downrange tracking system for a launch from a different pad.

There was a panel at the satellite conference a couple weeks ago on the need not to just rethink the range, but get rid of the concept entirely, as it becomes more like an airport. Like “human rating,” a “range” is an archaic concept from the early days of launching things into space on ordnance.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Chris Petty:

If the SES-10 launch proceeds without problems many of the doubters may be silenced and SpaceX could truly be on the brink of a real revolution in spaceflight – a tipping point at which expendable rockets become the exception for a launch company rather than the rule as they have been since the dawn of the space age in 1957. But can reusability really work? It has become something of a fashionable mantra from some within NASA to state that the Shuttle proved reusable vehicles couldn’t be economically competitive with expendable launchers. Whilst this was certainly the case for the hugely expensive shuttle, this single example shouldn’t be taken as a rule that can be broadly applied to reusable vehicles per-se. There were many factors inherent within the shuttle’s design that conspired to mean that the planned high flight rates could never be attained, nor could the aspiration of ‘aircraft-like operations’ with highly automated check-out procedures and rapid turnarounds between flights ever be achieved. Many of these had their roots in the restricted post-apollo budgets from which the compromised design for the Space Transportation System emerged.

With the Falcon 9, SpaceX has been able to iteratively design a launch system that could gradually test elements of reusability while still carrying out the all important revenue generating work of delivering payloads to orbit. Unlike the shuttle, failure during recovery was an option for the Falcon 9 during its development. This points to one of the key differentiators that SpaceX and fellow reusable commercial launch company Blue Origin, have on their side. With founders coming from the technology startup culture, both firms have concepts of lean, agile development ingrained into their corporate DNA. Functioning as space launch OEMs, they have developed their own vehicles and propulsion technologies from scratch. The risk in these new developments has been met partly by the significant financial resources of their founders, but also by clients willing to chance their fortunes with less-proven technology in return for reduced launch costs. While some still refer to SpaceX and Blue Origin as ‘New Space’ both are now well into their second decade of operation, so perhaps it is more appropriate to refer to Commercial Space as compared to the more established Government Space represented by NASA, where the cost-plus contract is still king and development takes place at a far slower pace, insulated to a large extent from market forces.

And at some point, as he notes, SLS will become so obviously ridiculous that it won’t survive.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorry, solved the missing link.

[Update a few minutes later]