But what about the Martian dinosaurs? Won’t anyone think of them?
Category Archives: Space
Sequestration And Commercial Space
A source who (for obvious reasons) wants to remain anonymous informs me that 45th Space Wing at Patrick is starting to cut back on maintenance and operations of range safety at the Cape through the end of the (fiscal) year.
I’ll bet I could find other places to cut that wouldn’t impact commercial launches, but the administration’s goal remains to inflict the maximum amount of pain. I should note that apparently the layoffs will start in the next couple weeks. Whether or not they’ll be able to get those people back in October is an interesting question.
Paul F. Dietz
Has anyone heard from him recently (i.e., in the last couple years)?
[Evening update]
OK, look, folks. I’m not stupid. I’ve done searches. I’m asking people who actually know him, and might know what’s up.
Piston Pumps
XCOR has now tested them for both fuel and oxidizer.
Mining Asteroids
This isn’t really satisfactory, though, without quantifying it:
So are asteroids celestial bodies like the moon? Or something different? A number of space-law scholars have weighed in recently. The bottom-line argument is, as Andrew Tingkang noted in a Seattle University Law Review article, that if you can move it, it isn’t a celestial body.
We see a similar distinction on Earth between “real” and “personal” property. Real estate is land. One of its chief characteristics is that it stays put. Personal property can be huge—a supertanker or a 747—but it’s movable. The rules relating to real property are different, and usually more stringent, than the rules relating to personal property. Land is accounted for by deeds and registries; for personal property, possession is enough to establish a presumption of ownership.
The biggest asteroids, like Ceres or Vesta, are probably too big to move, so even though they’re smaller than the moon, they might count as celestial bodies. But a 100-meter class-M asteroid is readily movable. It’s not real estate; it’s just a rock.
Anything, including the moon, can be moved. It’s just a matter of degree. When we slammed LCROSS into it a while back, we moved it, though probably not measurably. One clear-cut definition could be if you change the body around which it’s orbiting.
Progress On The Senate Launch System
The Future That Never Was
Ed Driscoll has what looks like an interesting post on the space colonization movement, but unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to link to it. The URL looks fine, but it redirects back to http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/. Is it just me? Can anyone else see it?
[Update a while later]
OK, just got a new URL from Ed, that works. I haven’t actually read the whole thing yet, because I couldn’t see the second page, but I may have more commentary after I do.
Jagged Ice
Europa could be a challenging place to land.
It seems to me that you just have to budget some extra propellant for a hover to melt it, then drop in with a floating ship. Too bad there’s no ice in the rings, or you could mine some propellant from them. But you could fuel up in the Belt before heading on to Jupiter.
Inspiration Apollo
Amy Shira Teitel writes that Apollo 8 was not done for the purpose of inspiration, though that was a huge side effect.
Here’s what I wrote in the book:
…despite all of the precautions, NASA did demonstrate its willingness to risk the lives of its astronauts, when in a daring mission, it won the space race in December of 1968 with the Apollo 8 mission around the moon. What was daring about it?
The previous April, there had been a partial disaster during an early test of the new Saturn V rocket, whose express purpose was to send astronauts to the moon. It suffered from the same “pogo” problems that had earlier afflicted the Titan, almost shaking the vehicle apart during ascent, with some structural failure in the first stage. Two of the second-stage’s five engines failed, and the single third-stage engine failed to reignite in orbit. Von Braun’s team went to work to sort out the problems, and a few months later, after some ground tests, declared it ready to fly again. NASA was under some pressure because there were rumors that the Soviets were going to send some cosmonauts to circumnavigate the moon with the Zond spacecraft by the end of the year (they had already sent some animals on such a trip).
While it wouldn’t have been a loss of the space race, the goal of which was to land on the moon, and not just fly around it, being beaten to that next first would have been another blow to the national psyche after Sputnik and Gagarin, and the first space walk. The lunar module wasn’t ready yet, and not expected to be until the spring of 1969, so NASA decided to scrap their plan of doing an earth-orbit rehearsal, and instead decided to go for the moon on the very next flight of the Saturn V, and without another unmanned test flight despite the problems on the previous flight. They were willing to throw the dice, and the astronauts (Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders) were willing to risk their lives, because it was important. The whole purpose of the program was to demonstrate that our system was superior to the Soviets, and to be afraid to fly would have rendered it pointless. It is hard to imagine today’s NASA taking such a risk with its astronauts’ lives, because nothing NASA is doing today is perceived as being sufficiently important.
[Cross posted at Safe Is Not An Option]
The Fermi Paradox
Eleven of the weirdest solutions to it.
Actually, I continue to prefer this one.