I’m still trying to put what happened yesterday into historical perspective, but I think it will be one of the top five events of the first sixty years of space history. I wish we’d done it decades ago.
Category Archives: Space
The Harsh Reality Of The Senate Launch System
Bob Zimmmerman has a piece at The National Interest:
So, what should President Trump do? Does he continue to fund Ares/SLS/Orion, which is taking almost TWO DECADES and more than forty billion dollars to design, build, and fly a SINGLE manned capsule, or does he instead shut it down and have NASA buy the products it needs to explore the solar system from multiple competing private companies?
I know what I would do.
So do I.
Space Weather
New data that could provide warning of catastrophic solar storms. We need this both in space and on earth. I worry much more about the sun acting up than I do CO2.
The Static Fire Of The First Core Stage To Be Reflown
…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.
SLS isn't just programmatically insane, it's fractally so. It's completely nuts at whatever scale you look at it. https://t.co/PVYpsG3Tj7
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 29, 2017
[Bumped]
The ISS
Somebody just buy it already. The big question that I don’t know if anyone knows the answer to is how much it would cost to maintain it if you have to keep paying Boeing for replacement parts. Or how much they’d cost to get from someone else, and if it could be done.
The National Space Council
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.
NAD+
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]
Our Future Life In Space
…may happen sooner than we think.
Masten News
They’ve developed an interesting new propellant. Ultimately, I think that LOX/LH2 will rule space for chemical propulsion because of the ubiquity of water, but this looks like it will have a lot of interesting applications.
Living In Space
Things you’re not allowed to do.
This video I wrote for @SciShow Space and @hankgreen on what you can't do in space has over a million views! WHAAAAT https://t.co/8jtYNLq1RH
— Leah Crane (@DownHereOnEarth) March 22, 2017
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.