Category Archives: Space

Political Commentary, Space

Prepare To Be Shocked To Your Core

21 Comments

Bob Zubrin is poo pooing the LCROSS lunar water findings:

While the results obtained from the LCROSS mission are of some scientific interest, it needs to be understood that the amount of water discovered was extremely small. The 30 m crater ejected by the probe contained 10 million kilograms of regolith. Within this ejecta, an estimated 100 kg of water was detected. That represents a proportion of 10 parts per million, which is a lower water concentration than that found in the soil of the driest deserts of the Earth. In contrast, we have found continent sized regions on Mars, which are 600,000 parts per million, or 60% water by weight.

…For the coming age of space exploration, Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland in the previous age of maritime exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe, and Europeans reached it first, but it was too barren to sustain substantial permanent settlement. In contrast, North America was a place where a new branch of human civilization could be born. The Moon is a barren island in the ocean of space; Mars is a New World. Mars is where the challenge is, it is where the science is, it is where the future is. That is why Mars should be our goal.

Let’s ignore the fact that NASA disagrees that the moon is drier than earth’s driest deserts, in light of the latest findings. As Michael Turner notes in comments, the problem with that analogy is that there is a huge difference in travel time and expense between the moon and Mars, whereas they were essentially equivalent between Greenland and the rest of North America, in terms of the technology required to get there.

Is there more water, easier to process on Mars than on the moon? Sure, as long as you’re on Mars. Therein lies the rub. This sort of reminds me of the old joke about the guy searching for his car keys in the street at night. Someone walks up and asks if he can help. “Where did you lose them?” “A couple blocks over that way.” “Well, why are you looking here?” “There’s better light.” I say sort of, because it’s not clear what are the keys and what is the light in this analogy.

Anyway, if we can use lunar water to facilitate trips to Mars, isn’t that a desirable goal? Not to Bob, who wants to go Right Now, which would be fine if he were doing it with his own money. He understandably fears that lunar activities will prove a diversion from The One True Goal, in both money and time, as ISS has. But whether or not that would be the case is a function of the reason for the lunar base. If its focus is on utilizing resources (and indeed, if it has a focus, which iSS never did, other than as a jobs program for NASA and later the Russians), there is no need for it to be a diversion — it could in fact be a major stepping stone to not just Mars but the entire solar system. On the other hand, the way that NASA currently plans to get back to the moon (the “Program of Record”) would almost certainly bear out Bob’s worst fears. But the argument shouldn’t be about destinational priorities; it should be about the most cost-effective means of developing the capability to affordably go wherever we want.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

A Vision Of The Future In Space

5 Comments

In comments over at Space Politics, “Ray” responds to the Ares boosters over there (who are hilarious in their blind adulation of the program, or would be were it not so sad — as I say over there, they haven’t just drunk the kool aid, but are snorkeling around in an Olympic-sized pool of it):

Kaylyn63: “…fasten your seatbelt and hang on for the ride Ares is going to give the United States”

Ares has already taken the United States on quite a ride, so I can only imagine what’s next:

– ISS science and engineering cut beyond the bone
– ISS dumped in the ocean in 2015
– Ares 1 delivered in 2017 – 2019 to service the long-gone ISS
– huge commercial space opportunities lost for U.S. industry
– NASA Aeronautics vanished
– Planetary science robotics, including missions to scout human spaceflight destinations, fading to a shadow
– NASA research, development, and technology demonstration work cut and limited to Ares investigations
– NASA Earth science missions few and far between
– Ares V delivered in 2030, but no budget to put anything on it
– EELVs, Falcons, and Taurus II greatly underutilized (and thus more expensive per launch than necessary) by the loss of commercial crew transport to LEO, fuel launches, early destruction of the ISS, and lack of budget to launch robotic missions – resulting in U.S. launch industry not being competitive in the global marketplace

Thanks, Ares!

So speaketh the ghost of Christmas future. If the goal was to destroy most of the useful things that NASA is, and could be doing, then perhaps it is the “Invention of the Year” after all. It has managed to accomplish much along those lines already, even though it won’t fly for years…

The frightening thing is that Chairwoman Giffords has bought into the hype as well. Of course, she has sort of a conflict of interest, in that she’s married into NASA.

Economics, Space

Apollo Is Over

33 Comments

But some people can’t get over it:

The Flexible Path tries to satisfy everyone with a long laundry list of destinations, but it is more noteworthy for what it pushes back to the end of the line. The Program of Record (Vision for Space Exploration) has the objectives of manned landings on the Moon and Mars. The Flexible Path does the opposite—an anti-Vision—and tries to do everything except manned landings on the Moon and Mars. Lunar landings are replaced with lunar orbits, and Mars landings are replaced by Mars flybys and possibly Mars orbits. “Look but don’t touch” eliminates the servicing of surface equipment, in-situ resource utilization, and sample return for the Moon and Mars. Manned flights are two-way missions, so removing sample return is particularly short-sighted. The Augustine report includes part of a quotation from President Kennedy: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” If the Flexible Path had been around during Kennedy’s time, all the Apollo landing missions would have been cancelled.

Sigh…

I’m sorry that Mark Whittington’s stupid “Look but don’t touch” phrase seems to be picked up by more and more people, because it’s so misleading. Not doing the planetary surfaces first is not an “anti-vision.” It is simply a different vision, and much more practical one. I will say that “flexible path” is not my preferred plan — I would in fact go chase the lunar rainbows sooner than later, but it’s the best path of any of the proposed Augustine alternatives, because the methods that NASA has chosen for lunar return are simply unaffordable. And it doesn’t eliminate planetary excursions — it just puts them off until they do become more practical, and we’ve developed more deep-space experience. The commission continues to see human Mars landings as an eventual goal. But if you’re going to do that, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to me to go to Phobos or Deimos first, which requires much less earth-departure propellant, with the potential for getting more propellant from those bodies for expeditions down the gravity well.

And suppose that instead of the lunar goal, Apollo had in fact been about beating the Russians to an asteroid, or Phobos, in an unsustainable manner (as the lunar missions were performed)? How would we be any worse off today? In neither case would it have been about opening up space.

The Flexible Path attempts to replace the Ares 5, capable of lifting 160+ metric tons to low Earth orbit, with a less capable launch vehicle, going as low as the 75 metric tons of the EELV-derived vehicle. The notion that the Flexible Path brings us closer to Mars is dispelled by this push for a less capable launch vehicle. Being physically closer to Mars, in terms of distance, does nothing if it runs away from the energy and mass requirements of a Mars landing. The variety of missions possible using the Ares launch vehicles is actually wider and more diverse than what the Flexible Path allows. The Ares launch vehicles are certainly more than capable of launching missions to Lagrange points, near-Earth objects, and any other destination on the list. Reduced capabilities make the Flexible Path decidedly inflexible.Sigh…

This is an extremely simple-minded view of “capabilities.” Is a vehicle with a larger payload better than one with a smaller payload? Yes, all other things being equal. But all other things are rarely equal. One has to take a total systems approach to determine the optimum, and not just focus on a single system element (this applies to safety as well as cost, by the way). If, for example, one can buy ten flights of the smaller vehicle for the cost of a single flight of the larger one, which is better? It’s hard to say, unless one looks at the total mission cost, including amortization of development, as well as legacy value toward the future. Unless one imagines that one will be able to do a Mars mission with a single launch of Ares V (and even its proponents admit that you can’t), then eliminating it does not necessarily affect ability to get to Mars at all.

Consider two alternate architectures. One invests in the development of a large launch system sized for (say) a lunar mission, and ignores the orbital operations necessary to assemble pieces in orbit, or to fuel them. The other takes the money that could be spent on launch systems and instead focuses on the latter technologies, using them to leverage the transport capabilities of existing or slightly modified vehicles.

At completion of development, the former has a lunar transport system (as long as it doesn’t go down for some reason) that has no other capabilities, because it is too small to go anywhere else, and there was no investment in the orbital technologies necessary to do multiple launches with it. And if it goes down for some reason for some significant period of time (as every launch system has to date, other than the EELVs, and it may just be a matter of time for them), the entire enterprise is shut down. If one wants to go to Mars, it will be necessary to either develop those technologies originally spurned, or to develop a (perhaps impossibly) larger-yet launch system. And each flight will be horrifically expensive, and the vehicle will never develop high reliability, because its flight rate will be too low. This is taking the fundamental mistake of the Shuttle (which was not reusability) and tripling down on it.

On the other hand, the latter course provides a system which can assemble arbitrarily large interplanetary missions in orbit to any destination, using a variety of launch systems, ensuring that any one of them standing down does not prevent human space missions beyond LEO. So which one is truly flexible, not to mention resilient?

The Flexible Path replaces set destinations and set dates with a hazy cloud of uncertainty. NASA did not achieve Apollo like this. If the Flexible Path is as good as its proponents say, why will it be applied to human spaceflight exclusively? The entire space agency should have a chance to experience this new transformative policy. But with lesser objectives, lesser launch vehicles, and a lesser budget, it is unlikely the rest of the agency would enjoy the experience.

Let me say it one more time. It doesn’t matter how NASA achieved Apollo, for two reasons. First, Apollo had nothing to do with space. Second, NASA had an essentially unlimited budget with which to accomplish the goal, which was not to open space to humanity, but to beat the Russians in a technological joust. Until we understand this, and stop yearning for something that never was, and never will be, we will continue to waste billions of taxpayers’ money on Cape spectaculars, and never make much progress in space.

I would add one more point, for those who fear the Yellow Menace on the moon, or any other nation that follows the Apollo paradigm. Space will not be opened by throwing large vehicles away a few times a year. If we couldn’t afford it, at the height of our power and influence in the sixties, why should we believe that any other country can?

[Update in the late afternoon]

Incoherent in his apoplexy, seething with unreined rage, foaming at the mouth and eyes bulging, beard afire, Mark Whittington leaps so hard at his chain that he breaks it, and pounds out incomprehensible gibberish on his keyboard about this post and the previous one.

What?

I’m exaggerating? You don’t say…

I also think it’s hilarious that his permalinks still have double page markers, after all these years of running that blogspot blog.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ray from Vision Restoration blog makes a very good point over there:

The Program of Record has virtually nothing to do with the Vision for Space Exploration except at the most superficial level, such as the initial destination (the Moon). The Flexible Path as outlined in the report is a lot closer to the Vision for Space Exploration than the Program of Record. Check out the Vision for Space Exploration documents, the Augustine Committee report, and the status of Constellation – or see some (of many) examples here of how far the Program of Record is from the Vision for Space Exploration.

It is really annoying to have to deal with commentary by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, and don’t even bother to read the class assignment. Including Mark Whittington.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Setting It Up

4 Comments

…and knocking down a straw man, over at The Space Review, by Dr. Day:

Occasionally, space activists critical of NASA claim that whereas the civilian space agency is a badly-run bureaucracy that ought to be eliminated and replaced with something else, the military manages to do a much better job with its space program. The military, which they believe to be immune to congressional micromanagement and political interference, somehow manages to do great things in space.

Which “space activists critical of NASA”? With whom is he arguing? Can he name names? I wouldn’t claim that this argument has never been made, or that there aren’t people who hold such a view, but I’m not aware of any. It certainly isn’t representative of “space activists” in general. So I’m not sure what his point is. He then goes on to kick the straw out of the thing with a list of past and current DoD space (and other) procurement screwups, with which anyone who has been following things is quite familiar. And his conclusion?

By now you might have detected a common theme here: procurement of complex hardware is hard. Many projects are over-budget and behind schedule, not just at NASA, but everywhere.

Actually, that’s not the common theme that I detect. The common theme that I detect is that the government procurement system for space is seriously FUBAR, whether civil or military. One of the places that such cost and schedule problems aren’t the case (at least not to the huge degree that the government programs are) is SpaceX. Yes, things have taken longer than they hoped, and probably cost more, though we have less insight into that, because we don’t know what the original estimates were, but here’s the bottom line: they have mostly developed both a launch system and a pressurized return module, capable of carrying crew with the addition of life support and launch escape, for about a hundredth of the cost that NASA estimates it will take to develop Ares I alone. And what is the “uncommon” theme here? SpaceX is doing it with their own money, and not subject to government procurement rules and the dictates of porkmeisters on the Hill.

[Early afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey has further thoughts:

SBIRS and many such projects at least have the virtue of advancing the state of the art. ARES I retreats from the state of the art. Rather than building on lessons learned from the Shuttle and taking a step forward towards practical, low cost reusable space transport, Griffin backtracked the agency and led it down the Ares I dead end where no development path to lower cost space access exists. Furthermore, it was known from the start that Ares would be hugely expensive both to develop and to operate. It is just an added insult to the taxpayer that, on top of all that, Ares turned out to have several serious technical problems that resulted in delays and even more costs. Hanging around with a rough crowd offers no excuse for this miserable project.

Indeed.

Political Commentary, Space

None Of The Above, Continued

13 Comments

That remains my choice among NASA’s heavy-lift options. Doing a new Saturn V seems particularly crazy to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

More over at the Orlando Sentinel space blog. It’s an interesting point that one of the (many) issues with solids is that they are a lot harder to transport to the pad. And I don’t think that the human spaceflight program should be held hostage to the Pentagon’s need to keep ATK in business for military solid work. If it’s important to national security to have a solid manufacturer available, then let them pay for it, instead of perverting NASA’s launch systems and budget.

Media Criticism, Space

This Is Like A Bad Joke

13 Comments

Time has named the Ares-I the “Invention of the Year“:

TIME’s best invention of the year may send Americans back to the Moon and put the first human on Mars.

Do they even know that it can’t deliver people beyond earth orbit? On the other hand, it is really tall…

This kind of technological illiteracy is pathetic, but it’s what I’ve come to expect from the likes of Time.

[Mid-morning update]

From a reader:

My company was selected for a Time “Invention of the Year.” Hooray, we thought. Then the phone calls from Time started. A bored 20-something with a false Valley girl accent called to talk to the inventor of the thing we had been nominated for. We responded that there was no one person, it was a company-wide effort. It took, and I do not exaggerate, at least 30 minutes to get it through her head that “company” meant “more than one person.” Then the so-called fact checker wanted to know how the one person got the idea for the invention. We patiently explained that it was the company’s job to make such products and that more than one person had contributed to the idea and the building of our nifty little gadget. The fact checker did not know the difference between a pound and a kilogram, had no knowledge of basic chemistry, had never heard of the founders in our field, and didn’t even know what our gadget looked like. Subsequent calls did not remove the impression of careless indifference. Time never did get the story right.

Since that day I have never trusted a single story from Time. Not one. If the writers and editors can’t understand the difference between a pound and a kilogram, what else are they missing?

A lot. It’s a lot easier to just grab a press release from NASA PAO than to have to actually understand what the hell you’re talking about..

[Mid-afternoon update]

More thoughts on the cluelessness of this from Keith Cowing.

Popular Culture, Space

Because I Didn’t Have Time

27 Comments

Clark Lindsey has done us all the favor of reviewing The Space Review today. Like him, I was struck by Tayylor Dinerman’s completely ignoring ULA in his discussion of the “burgeoning” commercial space industry. But even more, I agree that Dwayne Day’s broad conclusion about public interest in space and space settlement from a single stupid network program is absurd:

The paradigm that near-term space can only involve a small number of people in a small habitat doing technical and scientific tasks does not lend itself to great story telling. Conflicts are required for compelling stories and lots of different types of conflicts are needed to generate enough stories for a compelling TV series. I think the “nearest” near future space scenario that could generate an interesting diversity of plots with a diversity of characters would involve a couple of thousand people populating multiple LEO space stations and habitats at a Lagrange point and bases on the Moon. Commercial, government, and international activities of various kinds would inevitably lead to all sorts of conflicts.

Let’s ignore the fact that most television shows (and particularly Big (though becoming smaller) Three Network television programs) fail, often epically. Big media, like (apparently) Dwayne, remain stuck in the Apollo paradigm of space being about a few civil servants doing science and exploration, at great government expense. Here’s an idea. Try a show about real space pioneers and see how popular it is. IIRC, “Lost In Space” actually did pretty well back in the sixties, or at least a lot better than the schlock that Dwayne reviewed. It’s not the sixties any more, but let’s give it a try anyway. It’s not like LIS was based on the NASA paradigm, so that wouldn’t explain its sixties success, right?