Justin Kugler has a good analysis of the NASA Authorization bill over at Open NASA.
Category Archives: Space
Mind Your Own Business
I was going to comment on this the other day, but Ezra Levant, who has more of a dog in the fight (so to speak), has:
NASA used to be about exploring space — that’s what the S stands for. But NASA’s new boss, Charles Bolden, recently told Al Jazeera TV that Obama has given him new marching orders: Inspire children to learn math, expand international relationships. “Perhaps foremost. he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.”
I guess that’s what happens when a “community organizer” becomes president.
But when you think about it, Hansen is following Obama’s instructions perfectly: The Saudis probably do “feel good” that NASA is trying to shut down their Canadian oil competitors.
I wish that Hansen was muzzled half as much as he pretends he is. He is, or at least should be, an embarrassment to the agency.
The End Of The Space Race
…happened forty-three years ago today. In an excerpt from the book I’m working on:
…sadly for the enthusiasts, as already noted, it wasn’t really about space. As even the supposedly visionary Kennedy told his NASA administrator, James Webb, a few months before his assassination in 1963, “I don’t care that much about space.” It was about national prestige, not space per se – space was just the venue in which the competition was to be fought. Had Kennedy not been assassinated, it’s not clear that the Apollo program would have continued, or at least no more than it was under Lyndon Johnson who, under pressure from the Congress with the rising costs in blood and treasure from Vietnam, and the Great Society (and riots in Newark, Watts and Detroit, and other inner cities), actually ordered the end of production of new hardware in 1967, two years before the first landing. In fact, it was likely only the perceived martyrdom of the president who started the program that allowed it to go on as long as it did.
Beyond that, the space race was viewed as so expensive that many in the government (particularly those of a socialistic bent in the State Department) wanted to end it permanently, and in a sense they did, by signing and ratifying the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, which banned claims of national sovereignty off planet. Absent claims of national sovereignty, private off-planet property claims became, if not impossible, problematic. This had the intended effect of significantly reducing the incentive for nations to race to other worlds, including the moon. It also dramatically reduced the incentive for private enterprise to invest its own resources in doing so, even if there were some way of getting a return on the investment, by creating uncertainty in the legality of extraterrestrial property and real estate.
Alan Wasser is trying to do something about that. This is the sort of thing a Congress truly interested in conservative space policy would do, instead of keeping the pork flowing.
The Near Frontier
…and the far one. Thoughts from Rick Tumlinson on where we go next in space policy.
NASA Is Authorized
The president signed the bill today. As Jeff Foust notes, the main thing this does is to start the clock ticking on some reporting requirements for the agency. I assume that they’ve already been working on the analyses. I hope that they’re done and released more transparently than ESAS was.
Not Waiting For A Heavy Lifter
Some common sense from the Europeans:
“We need the courage of starting a new era,” Europe’s director of human spaceflight, Simonetta Di Pippo, told BBC News.
“The idea is to ascend to the space station the various elements of the mission, and then try to assemble the spacecraft at the ISS, and go from the orbit of the space station to the Moon. We need the courage of starting a new era.”
“What we are thinking about right now – but again we need more technical work to address this – [is] it should be a small spacecraft that goes around the Moon.”
…Learning how to assemble exploration vehicles at the ISS would also be part of this new vision.
If humans ever do go to asteroids or Mars, the scale of the infrastructure needed to complete a safe round trip could not possibly be launched on a single rocket from Earth. It will have to be sent up on multiple flights and joined together in orbit.
Gee, what a concept.
Doing this assembly at the ISS means it can be overseen by astronauts with ready access to tools if needed.
And if the crew assigned to man the deep-space mission travels up separately to the station, it would also mean all the elements for their long-duration flight could be launched without the complications of ultra-safe abort systems that complicate manned rockets.
The crew could instead ride to orbit in a simple, tried and tested rocket, such as a Soyuz, and then transfer across to their deep-space vehicle already waiting for them at the ISS.
The only problem with this is that it doesn’t address the issue of how to get back to the ISS orbit from deep space. As I said at Space Access in April, I view this as one of the fundamental problems of decoupling earth-LEO from pure space transportation. The solution will lie in either aerobraking, or cheap propellant, or some combination of the two.
But it’s nice to see people starting to think about how to make progress without waiting for a heavy lifter that will never arrive. It’s not the lack of heavy lift that has trapped us in LEO for decades. It’s the false perception that we need it.
[Update a while later]
A question in comments:
Would shifting the ISS orbit higher (now that it doesn’t need to be shuttle-reachable) be of any use here?
Not much, unless it’s a lot higher. L-1 or L-2 are much better portals to the rest of the solar system. Here’s a question — how big a launcher would it take for a direct inject of a capsule (Dragon or CST class) to L-1? The idea here would be to have a propellant depot in LEO that could deliver the propellant to L-1 by a slow ship, with a crew system to get people to/from L-1 quickly. Eventually, perhaps, the propellant could come from the moon. An alternative would be to depart to L-1 from the ISS, but not return to it from there, instead going directly back to earth. That way, you’d have a good staging area that was also relatively easy to get back to, and allow multiple expeditions without having to enter the atmosphere.
The SSI Space Manufacturing Conference
A discussion of the revival by Lee Valentine and Doug Messier. It’s coming up in less than three weeks, and I hope to attend, money/schedule permitting. I attended some in the later seventies and early eighties, but it would be my first since then. It will be a little weird for it to not be in Princeton.
First Free Flight
Virgin Galactic has released video. Interesting that they’re using a skid on the nose instead of a wheel. Makes sense from a weight standpoint, and it’s easy to refurbish or replace between flights if necessary.
[Late morning update]
I suspect that Sir Richard is exaggerating. Given all the other hype, one would think that if they were having successful engine tests, they’d invite the press for one or two.
To Boldenly Go To China
A discussion over at Slashdot. As a commenter notes, it’s not very smart politics to go against the wishes of the incoming chairman of the appropriations subcommittee. I’d really like to know what the White House thinks. I think that it’s time for Charlie Bolden to go, though, as I’ve said, it will be tough to replace him, particularly in the current heated political environment.
Congratulations To Scaled
SpaceShipTwo had it first free flight today. Obviously these tests are on the critical path to first flight, but so is the engine, and we still haven’t heard much news about that lately.
[Update a while later]
Clark Lindsey has the press release.