Category Archives: Space

Business, Media Criticism, Space

More Space Misreporting

14 Comments

There’s a story over at the Grauniad today about the dotcom space millionaires, featuring Elon Musk and SpaceX. As usual, the reporter doesn’t understand what Constellation is/was:

His confidence has been boosted following last month’s decision by President Barack Obama to drop funding for the Constellation programme – the Nasa spacecraft intended to replace the space shuttle, which is to be grounded later this year.

Once again, Constellation is not now, and never was, a “replacement” for the Space Shuttle. If anything, it’s a replacement for Apollo. It’s an architecture of vehicles designed to get humans back to the moon, including launchers, capsule, earth-departure stages, and lunar lander and ascent vehicle. And the only parts that are really being cancelled are the Ares I launcher and the Orion crew module, because none of the rest of it was scheduled to start development for years.

Beyond that, the reporter doesn’t seem to understand the difference between suborbital and orbital, saying that Falcon I went to suborbit. Well, the first one did, but the other four went to orbit, albeit only the last two with full success. And all five were intended to.

Space

David Brin On Space Exploration

26 Comments

There are some videos over at Next Big Future. I have no comments on them, because I haven’t taken the time to watch them yet, but some of my readers may be interested. It will be nice when it gets cheap to transcribe things like this.

I will say, though (as I often think) that it would be nice to banish the word “exploration” from the discussion. Brin appears to be talking about a lot more than that. That was a perhaps fatal flaw with the Bush plan — calling it the Vision for Space Exploration. As long as we think that we’re doing “exploration,” it opens up a hole big enough to fly a shuttle through for opponents to say, “let’s do it with robots.” What we needed was a vision for space development and a vision for space settlement. Once you get buy-in for that, the notion of doing it without people becomes instantly absurd.

Political Commentary, Space

Hardball

30 Comments

“Sell your vote, and we will publish it.”

Sounds good to me. That’s just called political accountability. I also like the threat that any nominations for sold votes will be held by the Senate.

Speaking of which, there’s an interesting rumor over at Human Events:

Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) who announced his retirement from Congress has been promised the job of NASA administrator in exchange for his vote, and Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), another retiring Democrat, has been promised an appointment as U.S. Ambassador to NATO in exchange for his vote.

It will be interesting to note any job announcements from this Tennessee duo post-House retirement. Both voted against passage of the House bill back in November.

Emphasis mine. If true, this has at least two implications. First, the administration is willing to throw Charlie Bolden under the bus. Second, they’re also willing to throw the new plans for NASA under the bus for health care, because Gordon (who just happens to be the relevant committee chairman) has expressed skepticism about them:

Even Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), the House Science and Technology Committee chairman who has no real parochial interest in Constellation, branded NASA’s budget request “a radical departure” from the Bush-era plan twice endorsed by Congress.

Stay tuned.

[Update a few minutes later]

As I said, if it’s true. My question is: why would he even want the job, particularly if he relishes the status quo? It’s no plum.

[Update a couple minutes later]

In light of this news, you might want to listen to the live webcast of the Senate Commerce Committee hearings discussing commercial crew. It’s quite a line up. But it may or may not be relevant, depending on how the policy works out.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Clark Lindsey is following Twitter feeds on the hearings. Stafford is testifying now. Saying that we need the POR for “risk mitigation.”

I never fail to be astounded that people don’t recognize the high amount of risk with Ares.

[Early afternoon update]

Over at Space Politics, pseudonymous commenter “Major Tom” notes that this may be a recycling of an old rumor from last year, before Bolden was chosen. That is certainly possible. It would be nice to see some substantiation or verification of it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Gordon has announced that he is now a yes vote on the bill. FWIW. For some reason, no quid pro quos are discussed.

Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

Back To The Drawing Board?

21 Comments

I’ve never been a big fan of nuking asteroids, but this test should cause some concern:

Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Catherine Plesko of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico simulated blowing up asteroids 1 kilometre across. When the speed of dispersal was relatively low, it took only hours for the fragments to coalesce into a new rock.

“The high-speed stuff goes away but the low-speed stuff reassembles [in] 2 to 18 hours,” Korycansky says. The simulations were presented (pdf) last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

So you have to have a big enough bomb to really do the job. I think there are better, more controllable ways.

Business, Economics, History, Space

Huh?

50 Comments

Why does the Air Force think that their launch costs will go up with the new policy? Look at the caption of the picture:

Less demand could drive up costs for rocket propulsion systems used to launch Air Force satellites.

This makes no sense. How is flying additional missions for NASA creating “less demand”?

There are two factors that will affect the price of EELVs with the new policy. The first is that adding failure on-set detection to the vehicles may increase their production cost, but I can’t imagine it will be by much. Most of the cost will be in development, which could legitimately be charged to NASA. The second is that increased demand will provide a higher flight rate (which the system is quite capable of, in both production and operations), which will allow the amortization of fixed costs over a larger number of flights, reducing the cost (and presumably price) per flight. From that standpoint, the Air Force should welcome this (and always should have, and in fact not approved NASA’s Ares plans). Moreover, a couple years ago the Air Force was considering forcing one of the lines to shut down, to save fixed costs, which goes against the doctrine of assured access to space, because if there was a problem with the remaining vehicle (whether Atlas or Delta), the Air Force would have no ability to launch its satellites. Increasing the demand like this allows both lines to continue affordably. I just don’t understand the concern.

Is there anyone who can explain this?

[Update a couple minutes later]

I see that Clark Lindsey is scratching his head, too. I just don’t know what Gary Payton is thinking.

[Update a few minutes later]

Commenters over at NASA Watch can’t figure it out, either. So it’s not just me.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I’m starting to infer that the problem is the production base for the solids. Apparently, ATK and others have been sharing fixed costs between NASA and the Air Force, and if NASA is no longer purchasing SRBs, as Shuttle ends and Ares doesn’t begin, the Air Force will have to bear the full burden.

Well, boo frickin’ hoo. So the taxpayer will no longer be subsidizing the Pentagon with NASA’s budget, and the actual cost of maintaining our missiles and boosters for defense will become more transparent. Why am I supposed to be concerned about this?

Media Criticism, Space

More Media Misconception

55 Comments

Joel Achenbach comments on the “botched rollout” of the new space plans:

The Administration failed to control the narrative. We are a species that communicates with, and makes sense of the world through, stories (as someone wrote a while back). My piece the other day in The Post quoted Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) saying that folks in Florida think Obama killed the manned space program. Of course, Obama actually boosted funding for NASA, and a lot of money is going into technology development. But he nixed the idea of going back to the moon in the near term. Where will we go instead? Unclear. Undecided. The moon is still a possibility, but maybe we’ll go to an asteroid or the moons of Mars.

Obama didn’t “nix the idea of going back to the moon in the near term.” Mike Griffin did that, de facto, when he chose his disastrous Apollo on Geritol architecture. All that Obama (or rather, the people who came up with the new policy) did was to formalize the notion. It is in fact likely that we’ll get back to the moon sooner with the new plans than we had any hope to in the old one. If the media had actually paid attention to, or better yet, read the Augustine report, they would understand this. I will give him credit, though, for not succumbing to the mindless hysteria about Obama having “killed the manned space program.”