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.
Category Archives: Space
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.
Good News On ITAR
I’ve long said (to paraphrase Mark Twain) that ITAR is like the weather — everybody talks about it, but no one ever does anything about it. Well, that may be about to change:
The legislation gives the president the authority to remove satellites and related components from the US Munitions List (USML), hence removing them from the jurisdiction of ITAR. (It would not, though, allow the export of such items to China.) Other provisions of the legislation would direct an ongoing review of the USML “to determine those technologies and goods that warrant different or additional controls”, which could benefit the space industry even if the White House didn’t exercise the provision to remove satellites and related components from the list wholesale.
The legislation passed the House last year, but for several months has been sitting in the Senate, raising fears they may never consider it. But speaking on an ITAR panel at the Satellite 2010 conference last week, David Fite, a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee but speaking only for himself, said things were going “somewhat on schedule” compared to authorization bills in previous Congresses. That schedule would have the Senate passing its version of the authorization bill by the summer and a conference report reconciling the differences between the two in September or October.
It’s unclear from the reporting whether or not this will fix the problem for launch providers, or just satellite manufacturers. For instance, will it make life easier for the suborbital folks? Of course, the biggest problem is this:
“We are in an election year,” cautioned Fite. In his 11 years on Capitol Hill, he said, “I have never seen an environment that has been this partisan.” Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, concurred. “The danger is that this will become a political issue in an election year, which means it’s not going to be addressed on its merits, it will be addressed by slogans.” That will make it harder for reform to make its way through Congress and could also hurt the administration’s other reform efforts.
I’ve also long said that, as it took Nixon to go to China, only the Republicans can fix ITAR (though Duncan Hunter made sure it would never happen all through the Bush administration) because the Dems can’t afford to look weaker on national defense than they already do. I do fear very much that this will become a casualty of the very ugly campaign we’re heading into.
A Propellant Depot Architecture
Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing presented their current concepts at a recent NASA in-space servicing workshop. It’s an impressive story of the performance leverage that a depot gives you, even with Constellation. I wonder if the trade includes dry launch in the depot case?
It’s interesting that he shows how they could use a Falcon 9, and an Atlas, but that Delta is unmentioned. Of course, now that ULA has taken over, perhaps Boeing has no institutional bias any more. I assume that this is the story that he’ll be telling at Space Access in a couple weeks, in the panel that we’ll both be on.
I’d like to see more detail on the ops (one of the slides came through as black for me). How do they propose to reuse the GTO/GEO tug? Aerobraking, or impulsively? You might want to check out some of the other papers at the link to Clark Lindsey’s site as well.
Houston, We Have A Problem
Want to know why it will cost somewhere between ten and a hundred times more for NASA to develop a launch system/crew module than SpaceX? Things like this:
The NASA Inspector General said that during the three-day conference in Baltimore in 2008, the 317 attendees snacked on soda, coffee, fruit, bagels and cookies at a cost of more than $62,000.
As the article notes, that comes to over sixty bucks per day per person. And the ironic subject of the conference? Procurement.
Space Access Schedule
Henry Vanderbilt has released it, and Clark Lindsey has posted it. It’s only two weeks away.
‘m scheduled to be on two panels. But you should attend anyway. It’s going to be a very interesting year for it.