And Clark Lindsey responds, also explaining why commercial crew really is commercial, honest, even it it is a monopsony (which it won’t be).
Category Archives: Space
Painting What Can’t Be Seen
Some thoughts on the history of space art, with some excellent examples of the prescience of many of the artists.
The Goal Remains The Same
Laurie Leshin attempted to tamp down the mindless hysteria over the new space policy yesterday:
The new plan represents “a change in approach and philosophy, but not a change in goal,” said Laurie Leshin, NASA deputy administrator for exploration, in a speech yesterday at a Marshall Institute event on space exploration policy in Washington. “The goal remains the same: to see human explorers out in the solar system.” The new focus on “sustainable and affordable” human space exploration isn’t that new, she said, noting that it was emphasized back in 2004 by the Aldridge Commission that evaluated the Vision for Space Exploration (a committee she served on when she was a professor at Arizona State University.) “We’ve come back to needing to have new and enabling approaches in order to make this a sustainable program for the future.”
To emphasize the need for technology development—one of the cornerstones of the new plan—to enable sustainable human space exploration, she put up a chart showing the mass needed to carry out the latest version of NASA’s Design Reference Mission for human Mars exploration. “If today, with today’s technology, decided we wanted to go to Mars, our mission would have a mass about 12 times of the space station,” she said. “It’s just impossible.” Various technologies, from reducing cryogenic boiloff to in situ resource utilization, can get it down to a more manageable level, she said. “It’s not that these technologies are nice to have, they’re absolutely required if we’re going to have a sustainable path out into the solar system.”
I wish that people would understand what a hopeless dead end Constellation was. Regardless of the new policy direction, its rotting carcass had to be cleared from the road. I assume that we’ll be seeing a lot more details and specifics in the coming weeks and months (probably at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in a couple weeks).
[Update a few minutes later]
One of the things that encourages me about the implementation of the new policy is that Dr. Leshin, the new head of the Exploration Directorate, was on the Aldridge Commission, and understands better than most the need for affordability and sustainability recommended by that body. I suspect she’ll do a lot better job than Mike Griffin’s NASA of implementing all, or at least most of the Aldridge recommendations.
A Reusable Indian Rocket?
I don’t expect to see this thing fly into space any time soon. They don’t seem to be serious about it, as indicated by this:
“The RLV-TD will act as a flying test bed to evaluate various technologies like hypersonic flight, autonomous landing, powered cruise flight and hypersonic flight using air breathing propulsion. First in the series of demonstration trials is the hypersonic flight experiment (HEX),” it said.
“Powered cruise flight”? Of what value is that to getting into space (other than giving you azimuth and longitude flexibility)? Unless you can refuel it in flight, it will kill your performance.
I’ll repeat the three rules of aerospace vehicle design:
1) If you want to cruise, use an airbreather.
2) If you want to turn, use a wing.
3) If you want to accelerate, use a rocket.
In order to get to orbit, you have to accelerate.
[Update a few minutes later]
You’ll know that the Indians are serious about building reusable orbital vehicles when they start working on reusable suborbital vehicles.
Irony
An amusing tweet from Jeff Foust, before what looks like an interesting panel discussion:
Overheard pre-event chatter: “Democrats don’t think capitalism works below the atmosphere and Republicans don’t think it works above it.”
Sad but true.
Mimas
…is not boring. New details on the “death star.”
Only A Week And A Half Away
Henry Vanderbilt has released the latest (and probably ninety-percent certain) schedule for next week’s Space Access Conference in Phoenix (I wish he would have permalinks for these things…):
Space Policy Bleg
I know that a lot of politicians have been saying a lot of stupid and crazy things about the new space policy, but does anyone out there have some citable examples of them getting basic terminology confused (e.g., VSE versus Constellation, Constellation versus Ares, or Shuttle)? That is, something similar to this awful reporting?
Asilomar Two
Here’ is the first report I’ve seen on the conference this past week on geoengineering. I would have like to attend, but didn’t have either time or money right now. I was a little disturbed by what seemed to be an absence:
Participants…split into groups representing the two broad kinds of geoengineering: methods which block solar radiation from the sun, like spreading aerosols in the stratosphere, and techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere, like growing algae blooms at sea.
…A vexing question for participants was the role of commercial companies in this controversial field. A breakout group devoted to the idea of blocking sunlight—by whitening clouds or the ocean surface, for example—couldn’t agree on whether it should propose barring for-profit companies from the enterprise.
Ignoring the issue of the role of private enterprise, what I’m reading seems very terracentric (which isn’t uncommon among the scientific community — I think it was one of the reasons that it there was so much skepticism about Alverez’ dinosaur-extinction theory). After all, if the goal is to block sunlight, the closer to the source you are, the easier the job might be. Maybe there were some space-based solutions discussed, but you can’t figure it out from this report. One of the reasons that I wanted to attend was to provide a perspective that might not otherwise be there, and it looks like my fears were born out.
I’d bet that if you proposed (say) Ehricke-type solettas, or sunshades, you’d be laughed out of the room, largely out of ignorance of space transportation economics. I would have provided a tutorial to explain why it’s foolish to extrapolate costs of current launch systems to future large-scale space access, because I’ll bet that’s exactly what most of them would do (because it’s what most people do now). I’ll look forward to a more detailed report on the conference, though, including a full list of presentations.
[Monday afternoon update]
It should be noted that I’m not advocating geoengineering. I’m just pointing out that for those who do, they shouldn’t exclude space-based solutions because of false preconceptions. It’s sort of like my attitude toward NASA. I wouldn’t weep much if the agency was defunded (other than the personal impacts on my friends who are employees and contractors). But seeing as how that’s unlikely to happen, I’ll continue to lobby to at least have the funds spent sensibly, in terms of actually advancing us in space.
Good Space Policy News From The Health-Care Debate
It’s looking like there’s a good (or at least better — Tucson is a pretty Democrat place) chance that Gabrielle Giffords could lose her seat:
But AHCCCS officials concluded Thursday that the health care overhaul’s so-called “maintenance of effort” requirements require Arizona to keep its Medicaid program at current levels in order to keep getting federal dollars. They said the state will incur $3.8 billion of added costs for its Medicaid population before increased federal funding starts in 2014.
She’s one of three Arizona Dems who voted for it. It would be nice to not only get rid of her as chair of the subcommittee, so she will stop stacking the deck in hearings, but out of the Congress altogether.