Category Archives: Space

Popular Culture, Space

Bradbury At Ninety

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A perspective, over at National Review. Two things struck me about the piece, one of which has nothing to do with Bradbury per se:

While he is a great advocate for NASA and space travel, his greatest fictional works address the recurrent theme of much of the modern age’s more significant literature: the separation of spirit and imagination from technological achievement and the dangers that attend this divorce.

Note that James Person assumes that NASA and space travel are synonymous. This is a mind set that we have to break if we are to move forward in space. Here’s the other:

All too soon it was time to take our leave. Hamner, ever the gracious Virginia gentleman, shook hands with Bradbury and quietly expressed his thanks again for that long-ago piece of advice. As Bradbury turned to me, I shook his hand and said quietly, “Ray Bradbury, live forever!” Tears sprang into his eyes — he is a man who cries for joy at every kindness — and his mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, searching for words. Quickly he raised my hand to his lips and gave it a quick kiss. “God bless you, Jim,” he said. “God bless you — and I wish the same for you!”

What a contrast with Asimov, who was a notorious deathist (a major theme of The Bicentennial Man). Asimov is gone now, as he wished, and Bradbury is still with us, as he apparently continues to wish.

It’s not clear though, whether things like this will increase, or decrease his remaining time with us. If it’s the end of him, not a bad way to go.

Political Commentary, Space

Space Access Update

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Henry Vanderbilt has the latest on the space-policy battle in DC:

NASA Exploration Funding: The Battle Continues

“No man’s life and property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
– widely attributed to Mark Twain

This is a follow up to our last two Updates, both of them urgent political alerts in the continuing battle over fundamental reform of NASA’s human space exploration program. The good news is, with your help, the last round was a standoff. But the fight is far from over. It’s once again time to get active, if we don’t want to see these reforms sunk without a trace. And this time, we actually have a couple of weeks warning.

State of Play

The House NASA Authorization bill, HR.5781 was up for full House consideration, but was pulled back at the last second when it became clear there was considerable lack of consensus on major provisions. (To every one of you who called your Representative, thanks!) The Senate NASA Authorization, S.3729, meanwhile has been approved by the full Senate. Both House and Senate are now on recess till the week of September 13th.

The Senate version is not great, but is livable, with $3.9 billion overall Exploration funding split as follows: $1.6 billion for NASA development of a new in-line Shuttle-derived heavy-lift launcher, $1.1 billion for continuation of the Orion capsule, and $1.1 billion for the rest of Exploration. That last $1.1 billion includes reduced but still substantial funding for the Commercial Crew, Commercial Cargo, and other new space technology/exploration precursors we support. (S.3729 also fully funds Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research, under another account.) Close to a billion dollars of NASA exploration funding directed toward useful things is hugely better than we would have hoped for coming into this year.

The House version is extremely bad. HR. 5781 is essentially a blueprint for the destruction of NASA human space exploration in the name of saving it.
– Out of a total $4.5 billion Exploration funding, it devotes $4.2 billion to development of a new in-house NASA heavy booster (to be based on existing Ares work) plus a government-owned Station transportation system based on the Orion capsule.
– It makes drastic cuts in funding for developing US Commercial Crew and Cargo to Station capabilities, to a small fraction of NASA’s request.
– It imposes “poison pill” requirements on potential US commercial crew services that neither NASA nor existing Russian crew service providers have to meet.
– It zeroes Exploration Technology and Robotic Precursor Missions funding.

The gutting of Commercial Crew and Cargo budgets, and the Commercial Crew poison pills, will leave us spending hundreds of millions annually for non-US Station transport services for the foreseeable future, and will leave us with no backup should those non-US services have technical or political problems.

The new House-mandated NASA heavy booster and Station-transport Orion get less funding than, but a similar schedule to, what the Augustine Commission already found unworkable for the old Ares/Orion. The issue of what Station-Orion would fly on (2015 operational goal) while waiting for the new heavy lifter (2020 goal) is not even addressed, never mind funded. The odds are extremely poor that these projects would ever amount to anything beyond never-fly jobs programs. Even if the new vehicles do eventually fly, NASA would still have no deep space missions to fly on them, due to this bill’s effective starvation of all other Exploration precursor work.

Pursuing the path implicit in HR.5781 would reduce our nation’s international commercial space competitiveness, would damage our national space technology base, and would destroy NASA’s chances of moving out beyond low orbit in any meaningful way for decades to come.

What’s Next

Our understanding is that they’ll try to pass HR.5781 again right after Congress returns from this recess. There will be three opportunities to fix it: In negotiated modifications before it’s reintroduced to the House, by amendment on the House floor, or by negotiations in the House-Senate conference committee that will reconcile the two versions. The process may move very quickly once Congress is back. We need to prepare the ground now.

Recommended Action:

Contact your Representative and both your Senators, and ask them to support the Senate version of the NASA Authorization bill, because the House version is unacceptably bad. Get as many of your friends as you can to do it too. Numbers count. We need to make as many of our Representatives and Senators as possible aware of our concerns in the next few weeks, before deals start being made on the final NASA Authorization bill. Start doing it now, don’t wait till the last second. (We may ask you to do it again at the last second – a little repetition does no harm.)

Contact Info for Representative and Senators: If you know their names, you can call the US Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for their DC office. If you don’t know who your Representative is, go to http://www.house.gov/zip/ZIP2Rep.html and enter your home zipcode. (You may need the 9-digit version.) For Senators listed by state, go to http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Once through to their office, let the person who answers know you’re calling about the NASA Authorization bill. They may switch you to another staffer (or that staffer’s voicemail) or they may take the call themselves. (If you’re calling after-hours or they’re getting a lot of calls, you may go directly to a voicemail.)

Regardless, tell them you want (Representative/Senator TheirName) to support the Senate version of the NASA Authorization, because the House version has major problems.

Briefly give one or two reasons you support the Senate version…
– it provides adequate funding for NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo
– it supports US rather than foreign crew and cargo service providers
– it provides some funding for new NASA exploration technology
– it enhances our national technological competitiveness
– it partially addresses the NASA problems pointed out by the Augustine Commission and begins to restore NASA’s ability to usefully explore
– it supports the President’s NASA policy
…then a reason why you oppose the House version – see the bullet points in the HR.5781 paragraph above. Then answer questions (if any) as best you can, and politely sign off.

OK, that’s the basic version. Some of you may want to get more involved in this effort than making a few quick phone calls. Letters and faxes are great! (Emails much less so; you know how much spam you get – now imagine the amount a Congressman gets. Better to phone than to email.) Keep letters to one page, state your basic point (Dear Representative/Senator TheirName, I am writing to request that you support the Senate NASA Authorization, since the House version is very, very bad…) in the first sentence of the first paragraph, then go into a paragraph or two of supporting detail, then politely wrap up. Faxes may be slightly better than paper mails in that they arrive faster and more reliably – if you are going to paper-mail a letter, do it early so it has time to get through the security checks.

And for you real self-starters out there, your Representative and Senators are on recess, and will probably spend some time back at home with the voters in the next few weeks.
– You can show up at a “town hall” and get in line for the microphone with your request ready (“I’m worried about the future of NASA. I’m here to ask that you support the Senate version of this year’s NASA Authorization bill, because the House version has serious problems”) plus an example or two to give if you get the time.
– You can call their local office and try to set up an appointment to meet your legislator (or an appropriate staffer) and spend a few minutes making the case in person. If you do, we strongly recommend you study up on the details, do the whole well-groomed businesslike and courteous thing, practice making your case in less than the allotted time, and unless they keep you longer with questions, depart on-time gracefully.
– You can come up with some other way entirely to let them know what you, their constituent, want. We haven’t come close to covering all the conventional effective methods here. Just remember though, if you’re thinking of getting creative – keep it legal, keep it safe, make VERY sure it gets the point across unmistakably clearly – we’ve seen way too many political messages delivered so cleverly that nobody else can tell what the message is – and make SURE it doesn’t make us all look like flakes (way too easy when we’re talking space) or annoy people counterproductively. (Simple parameters, yeah, we know…) Then let us know how you did it!

There’s one other very effective way you can help out, if you can be in Washington DC for a few days around the start of the week of September 13th: Some of our DC colleagues are very likely to be organizing citizen lobbyist visits on Capitol Hill early that week. We plan to support their efforts. More on that as soon as we know more.

What it comes down to is, if we care about US space commercial and technical competitiveness, if we want to see NASA with some hope of going new and interesting places anytime soon, we need to keep at this, and we need to get more organized about it. To that end, if you do make a call, send a letter, or otherwise deliver the message, afterwards please email us at space.access@space-access.org, with “contact” in the email title, and describe briefly who you contacted, how you contacted them, and what (if any) response you got? (If you don’t want to go onto our mailing list for Updates, be sure to mention that.) Thanks!

Now go get ’em.

Posted here, because it doesn’t seem to be up at the web site yet, at least not with a permalink.

[Late afternoon update]

Here‘s the link.

Political Commentary, Space

I Don’t Think So

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Lori says that the battle between the White House and the Congress over space policy is over.

I’m not sure what this means. Does it mean that NASA is going to stand aside and hope that the Senate and House stalemate? Probably.

I found this bit interesting:

Marshall Director Robert Lightfoot accompanied Garver to the editorial board meeting and said his center is ready to get to work on a heavy-lift rocket.

“We don’t need to study it anymore,” Lightfoot said.

However, he said NASA can’t release its heavy-lift acquisition strategy until it knows what the new rocket must be capable of doing. That still hasn’t been decided, he said.

Great. We’ll design a rocket without knowing what its requirements are, as Congress has already done.

Actually, he’s wrong. The only thing that the Congress (or at least those in Congress involved in space policy) thinks that the rocket needs to be “capable of doing” is preserving jobs in the right places.

Space

Meeting Bill Haynes

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“…was perhaps the greatest thing to come out of my trip to the moon,” said Buzz Aldrin at the memorial today. I had a drink with him afterwards. It was old home week for friends of Bill, and there were many, going back decades.

It was a beautiful service. I said something like:

As the pastor said, I’m sure that Bill would be delighted to have gotten some of the people here into a church. In my case, he would have been shocked. Maybe enough to rouse the dead. [pause] OK, guess not, but it was worth a try.

I met Bill about thirty years ago, when I came out to California from Michigan, wet behind the ears, and went to work for Aerospace, and it was the start of a long and wonderful friendship. I hadn’t seen him much in the past few years because I’d moved to Florida, but I moved back a year ago and still didn’t get around to seeing him, for no damned good reason, and now I’ll regret it the rest of my life.

I see Buzz is here, and I don’t want to take any of his time away, nor do I want to step any one else’s speech with this story that I’m sure he told many others than me, but to follow up on what Bill Simon said about Bill’s interest in space, he wasn’t just interested in it, but wanted to go himself from an early age. When he enlisted in the Army Air Corps during the war, he told the recruiting sergeant that his goal in the service was to go into space. The sergeant scratched his head for a while, and said, “Sorry, son, but the army doesn’t have a space program. Maybe what you should do is just write down that you’re interested in ‘extremely high-altitude flight.'”

And that’s what Bill did. Fortunately for him, a couple years later, the Army captured some Germans who were escaping to the west from the advancing Russians, one of whom was named Wernher von Braun, and suddenly the Army had a space program. Then a couple years later, when the Air Corps became the Air Force, they got into it too, as did Bill, first with missiles, and then, after his retirement from the military, with space stations. He helped a lot of other people get into space, but it’s a shame that he never fulfilled his dream of doing it himself, unless he found a different way on Sunday.

Ad astra, Bill. Ad astra per perspera.

I found out that Bill Simon had taped seventeen hours of Bill telling his life story over the past few years, so perhaps a lot of a remarkable life will be preserved, along with his archives. It was a bittersweet occasion, and the most memorable funeral I’ve ever been to, I think.

Space

Bill Haynes Memorial Service

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I’m getting word that it has been moved up from Saturday to tomorrow at 4 PM. I don’t know location yet, but will update when I find out. Fortunately, I get into LAX about 12:30.

[Update a few minutes later]

St. Paul’s Lutheran Church | 31290 Palos Verdes Drive W. | Rancho Palos
Verdes | CA | 90275

When approaching from Hawthorne Blvd., it is necessary to turn left onto Palos Verdes Dr. South, pass the church (on the other side of the divided road), then make a U-turn onto Palos Verdes Drive West and drive back to the church. For the u-turn, they are asking people to continue past the first turn-out (where the accident took place) to a traffic-light controlled intersection.

[Update late evening EDT]

The Family has requested that in lieu of flowers donations be made to Boys and Girls Club of the South Bay. There is not currently a separate Memorial Fund for Bill, so please note that your donation is made “In Memory of Bill Haynes.”

[Update a while later]

Here’s the official obituary from the family:

William “Bill” Everett Haynes, 86, decorated Vietnam fighter pilot, of Rancho Palos Verdes, died Sunday, August 15, 2010, while driving his little red sports car to church. His loss is deeply felt.

Bill was born in Paris, France, on January 18, 1924, to Everett Campbell Haynes, a noted jockey in Europe between the World Wars, and Edna Heise Haynes. The Haynes family, including his younger brother, John Barrett Haynes, returned to Oklahoma in 1933, and moved to Los Angeles in 1942.

Bill relentlessly pursued his goal to be a fighter pilot and his dream of space travel. In 1943, he volunteered for the US Army Air Corps, where he served until the end of World War II. He obtained his undergraduate engineering degree at UCLA in 1949, and immediately joined the US Air Force.

His Air Force career took him and his family to Arizona, Germany, Ohio, Oklahoma, Southern California, Florida, and Virginia.

Prior to his service in the Vietnam War, Bill continually educated himself on the principles of flight and aircraft design and maintenance. He graduated from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, in 1954, and from the USAF Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, California, in 1956. In 1965, he earned his Master of Arts from USC in research and development systems management.

Bill worked in the Minuteman missile program in Cocoa Beach, Florida, starting in 1965.

From 1967 to 1968, Bill bravely served as the commander of the 90th Tactical Fighter Squadron (nicknamed the “Dice”) at Bien Hoa AFB, Republic of South Vietnam. Bill flew 187 combat missions over the Ho Chi Minh trail. He was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry. For the rest of his life, Bill enjoyed keeping up with his fighter pilot buddies via email and reunions.

He capped his Air Force career with a year in the Pentagon. He retired as a Lt. Colonel.

Following his retirement, Bill worked from 1969 to 1991 with various defense contractors, including Martin Marrietta, Doral Systems and SAIC, in Colorado, Germany and Southern California.

Bill moved to Rancho Palos Verdes in 1977, where he lived with his beloved wife, Christine Apelles Haynes, until his death.

Bill is survived by his wife, Christine, his daughters Susan Ellen Roberts, of Dallas, Texas, and Kirsten Michele Howland, of Palos Verdes Estates, his sons John Barrett Haynes, of Los Angeles, and Richard Craig Haynes, of Pilot Point, Texas, and his grandchildren, Emma Kent Roberts and Caden Everett Robertson Howland. His parents and his brother, a Korean War veteran, predeceased him .

In retirement, Bill enjoyed anything involving flight. From 1998 to 2004, he worked with a team building a replica of the original airplane flown by the Wright Brothers. After that, he flew his own hand-built Ultralight airplane. His most recent flight was last Friday.

Bill continued to be actively engaged intellectually until the end. He held US Patent no. 4,828,207, for “fluid lock” technology. He wrote and published articles on various scientific issues, including the presense of “Square Craters on the Moon.”

He deeply loved his grandchildren, his pet parakeets and holding forth on the great issues of the day.

Bill was a loyal member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Rancho Palos Verdes, for over 30 years.

I had forgotten that he even served in WW II, and got his commission later, after the war. He’ll be coming back here (DC) and buried across the river in Arlington, for a well-deserved and honored rest.

Political Commentary, Space

The Newest Tea Party Member

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Ray Bradbury:

“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week’s worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. “We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever.”

The man who wrote “Fahrenheit 451,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “The Martian Chronicles,” “Dandelion Wine”and “The Illustrated Man” has been called one of America’s great dreamers, but his imagination takes him to some dark places when it comes to contemporary politics.

“I think our country is in need of a revolution,” Bradbury said. “There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”

One of the stupidest aspects of the announcement of the new space policy was to make such a big deal of the fact that we weren’t going back to the moon. It was entirely unnecessary, because we weren’t going back to the moon under the old policy, either, and yet another own-goal by this politically clueless White House.

Space, Space History

Remembering Bill Haynes (Part 1?)

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He flew for the military from the post-WW-II era to Vietnam, was a jet test pilot, was an F-100 squadron commander, risked his life many times for many years, and continued to enjoy commanding high-performance machines all of his life, when ironically, it suddenly and unexpectedly ended with him losing a battle of momentum between his Mazda sports car and a Toyota Highlander, on his way to church, a devout Lutheran who spent his life dreaming of the stars, now at final peace with his God. In that regard, he reminds me, sadly, of Pete Conrad, who after commanding a mission to the moon and back, and becoming a leading light of entrepreneurial space, died riding the motorcycle that he loved on a tight curve just outside of Ojai.

Bill Haynes used to tell the story of when he joined the US Army Air Corps in the 1940s, and told them that he wanted to go into space. “Better put down ‘extreme high-altitude flight,’ son,” the recruiter told him, after thinking for a bit. “The army doesn’t have a space program. Yet.” It still doesn’t, of course, because not long after, it spun off the Air Corps into the Air Force.

I first met him in 1981, when we were both working for the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo. He was working the Military Man-In-Space program, which was looking into military applications for humans in space, which would be tested with military astronauts on the Space Shuttle, which was just going into service. After his military career ended in the late sixties, he had worked on both Skylab and Spacelab, and probably knew as much about space station design issues as anyone at the time. He was highly critical of the space station studies occurring at Marshall and JSC at the time, and predicted many of the problems that the program would encounter over the next decade and a half before it finally started actually launching parts into space.

He was also critical of plans to launch a fueled Centaur upper stage in the Space Shuttle (this was the original plan for launching Galileo). NASA was running into abort issues. In the event of a flight abort, they had to be able to dump the propellants before landing, because with full tanks, the stage not only weighed too much to land with, but presented a serious hazard, particularly because there was only a single bulkhead between the LOX and hydrogen tanks. The problem was that, in the event of a Return-To-Launch-Site abort, they couldn’t dump it fast enough. They had (heavy) helium bottles on board to blow the tanks down, but the pressure needed to make it happen fast enough for RTLS just blew through the fluffy liquid hydrogen, leaving it behind in a trail of helium bubbles.

Bill, Jim Ransom and I came up with a scheme to not only solve this problem, but to increase the performance as well (and one that readers of this blog may find familiar). Launch the stage dry. This would not only reduce the stage weight, because it wouldn’t have to take the loads of the propellant through the acceleration of ascent, but also reduce the weight of the cradle that held it, and eliminate the heavy helium bottles needed for abort.

Where would the propellant come from?

Because the Shuttle would launch with a light payload, there would be excess propellant in the External Tank at main-engine cut off condition, which could be transferred through the umbilical into the stage.

We did extensive analysis of it, but could never sell Lewis Research Center (the center responsible for the Shuttle/Centaur) or Rockwell on the idea (later, when I went to work for Rockwell, I worked with Jack Potts, the program manager for the Shuttle/Centaur, but after the program had died). Jerry Pournelle (who I hope is aware of Bill’s passing, and can make the funeral on Saturday and whose son, Rich, I saw in a meeting today, before I heard that Bill had been killed) has written about it.

Eventually, the delays of resolving the abort issue resulted in a shift of Galileo to a Titan, and many think that these delays, with lots of moves of the probe between decisions and the prolonged warehousing time until launch were the cause of the sticking umbrella antenna that reduced the data return when it eventually reached Jupiter, because it lost the graphite lubricant.

But the principle still applies, and was partially the basis for a lot of the recent propellant depot work (Dallas Bienhoff was at Aerospace at the same time as Bill and I, though I’m not sure if he was aware of the work at the time, and then went to work for Rockwell in Downey shortly before I did).

Other stories perhaps still to come, including the reactionless “Jones” drive, and the Crewlock. I hope that others who have Bill stories can chime in (I’m looking at you, Gary Hudson).

[Update a few minutes later]

Jerry Pournelle is apparently aware (you may have to scroll a little). I suspect he’ll have more to say later.

[Update in the afternoon]

As a commenter points out, I got the history a little wrong — Galileo did launch in the Shuttle, but on an IUS. The point remains that it was probably affected by the delays and remanifesting.