The horizontal test of the five-segment SRB (Ares I first stage) out in Utah scheduled for today has been scrubbed due to a hydraulic problem. They’re going to attempt to reschedule for sometime in the next few days after they sort out the problem.
Category Archives: Space
The Dog That Didn’t Bark
Anyone see something missing in this message from the administrator?
Lori and I are meeting on a regular basis with our NASA senior leadership to develop our strategy for the future once the final report is released. Additional details on the process will be shared as they become available. In the meantime, staying focused on our current missions is critical. Let’s safety fly out the shuttle manifest and complete the construction and build out of the International Space Station (ISS). Let’s continue our robust exploration of Mars through our robotic rovers and other vehicles yet to be launched. Let’s continue our superb execution of the missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) as we gather more data to support future human exploration of the moon. Let’s vigorously pursue the critical missions designed to enable us to gain the essential knowledge of Earth’s environment – our atmosphere, our oceans, our weather – that will enable our policy makers to make wise, informed decisions on climate change and other threats to our environment.
There seems to be one “current mission” not mentioned. It starts with a “C.” And ends in “onstellation.” At least as far as the administrator is concerned, Ares would seem to be dead.
They Could Use A Gas Station
LCROSS is low on propellant:
LCROSS is now perilously close to its built-in propellant margins, and Andrews said the team will probably have to cancel some activities that are not crucial to the mission.
“Our estimates now are if we pretty much baseline the mission, meaning just accomplish the things that we have to (do) to get the job done with full mission success, we’re still in the black on propellant, but not by a lot,” Andrews told Spaceflight Now late Tuesday.
LCROSS now has between 20 pounds and 40 pounds of extra propellant that could be used in unplanned activities, a relatively thin margin for satellite operations.
“We can finish this mission, but it makes our sensitivity to something happening quite high,” Andrews said.
If we were a space-faring nation, we’d send out a fuel truck.
Looking And Touching
Mark Whittington continues in his foolish mischaracterization of the Deep Space option. We can touch to our hearts’ content. And once (in the process of “touching”) we start to develop the resources of the asteroids and Martian moons, we’ll be able to affordably descend into the gravity wells. In particular, there is no basis for this statement whatsoever:
The development of ships capable of crossing interplanetary distances will likely remain in the purview of governments for the foreseeable future. There would be little if any hope of such space craft being developed commercially in the near term, especially if landing on the Moon and Mars were to be deferred indefinitely. Without actual places to go, the market for commercial space flight would be limited to low Earth orbit and, perhaps, Earth approaching asteroids.
People want to go to the moon. People want to go to Mars. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. That’s why he started his company. Bob Bigelow wants to go to the moon. Once access to orbit becomes affordable, he will. Once they, and Jeff Bezos, and others, are halfway to anywhere, they’re not going to wait for NASA to send someone before they do. To think that they would is to completely misunderstand their motivations and plans.
Is The NASA Budget Too Small?
Or is it badly spent? Long-time readers know where I stand on the issue.
Did He Or Didn’t He?
Keith Cowing can’t find anyone to corroborate rumors that Bolden questioned the Ares 1X flight at Michoud, as reported at Rockets’n’Such. FWIW.
Why Should We Care?
Are you sitting down? Prepare for a real shocker. A bunch of astronauts, many of whom have the program as their current meal ticket, support continuation of the fiasco. And the joint statement was put out by ATK. Yeah, they don’t have a dog in this fight…
I found this particularly annoying:
In the joint statement, provided by Alliant, the former astronauts say: “Our top concern…is to ensure the safest possible system is utilised. This requires a proven track record, building on important lessons learned…NASA’s Constellation programme is exactly that type of effort – infused with generational lessons learned.”
Well, of course that’s your top concern. But as a taxpayer, and space enthusiast, my top concern is having a system that’s affordable, and actually contributes to opening up space, things at which Constellation will be an epic fail even if it meets its stated program objectives. If the system isn’t safe enough for them, I know where we can find a lot of other people to fly it.
The Killer App For Suborbital Flights
Alan Boyle writes that it may be not tourism, but research.
People are going to look back at the history, and wonder why we weren’t doing this decades ago. There was certainly no technological reason.
Ignorance On Space Power
I found the comments in this piece more interesting than the article itself. Power from space may or may not make economic sense, and there are valid arguments against it, but the opposition to it displayed here is typical, and ignorant, and one of the reasons that proponents persist. From what I can see, what was being proposed was simply to revive the small-scale test using power from the ISS that was cancelled this year. But instead, we get things like this:
Why does the proposer think that it would be more efficient to beam energy from the international space station when sun beams are directly bombarding the surface of the earth already? He needs to be able to explain the physics and the economics and he apparently failed. The money needs to go to proposals that can realize fruition in 10-20 years, not some pie in the sky experiments that makes no economic sense.
…The experimental packages carried by Apollo astronauts took years to develop at great expense to meet NASA’s high standards of light weight, reliability and safety in the harsh conditions of space. You don’t just hand NASA a laser and solar cell you bought off the shelf and assembled into a crude prototype and tell them to aim it at a village in Africa during the 5 minutes a day that ISS might be overhead, assuming it’s not cloudy, assuming the villagers all wear safety laser goggles not to go blind, and so forth.
The benefits of beaming from space (though not the ISS) have been explained many times, and yet people persist in asking such foolish questions.
And then we have this:
there is NO way that any non-telecom based orbital outerspace project will be PRIVATE- COMMERCIALLY viable and self sustaining (creating a net economic surplus sufficient enough to pay down the costs of financing the project over time) until the cost of putting payload in orbit comes below 1000$ a pound. This isn’t even a discussion. Do your homework.
First off, there are already non-telecom-based projects that are viable and self sustaining (e.g., remote sensing) at current launch costs. But beyond that, the implication here is that $1000/lb is some sort of unachievable holy grail, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who understands the economics and technology that if one were in the business of launching powersats into orbit, the sheer economies of scale would drive it far below that. Not that this means that it will be economically viable, of course, but any argument against SPS that involves current high launch costs is fundamentally flawed. Then, along those lines, we get this:
Last time I looked into it, even if launch costs are assumed to be $0 space-based solar power isn’t economical.
Again, that would depend entirely on the assumptions in the analysis. And then we get this from someone claiming to be a physics professor:
Energy from space has been discussed since the 1970’s. It is a thoroughly crazy idea. The cost of putting anything (Solar cells in this case) in space is “astronomical”. The resulting microwave beam at the ground would exceed radiation standards over the wide area needed to collect it, and a buffer zone outside. If the beam ever went astray, large numbers of people would be exposed to forbidden levels of microwaves, without their knowing (until later, too late to do anything about it) they were being irradiated.
“…astronomical…” Sigh…
And the beam can’t “go astray.” This professor of physics is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of phased arrays. And who knows what a “forbidden” level is?
The saddest thing, though, is the degree to which NASA has screwed up public perceptions about this kind of thing, as demonstrated by this comment:
As cool as it would be to get solar stations up in space, NASA can barely focus itself enough to get us to the Moon, a feat we accomplished forty years ago. What chance do we even have of this working at all, regardless of the technological barriers?
Note the twin assumptions, commonly held: that NASA would do it, and that NASA can’t do it any more.
Landers, Schmanders
Could we get back to the moon with an elevator?
It’s certainly a lot easier problem, and one more within current tech, than one from earth. This is the kind of innovation that NASA should have been pursuing, instead of redoing Apollo.
Of course, an interesting question is how you’d get to other locales on the moon, so you’d still need a hopper of some kind (pretty much functionally equivalent to a lander, except for total impulse requirements), but if you could manufacture fuel at the base of the elevator, you could deliver it to orbit with the elevator, and to the rest of Luna with the hoppers/tankers, really opening up the whole planet, while dramatically reducing costs of operating in cis-lunar space. For example, whether it made more sense to get to the south pole by going down the elevator, and then hopping, or direct descent from the Lagrange point using lunar propellants would be a function of the relative economics and propellant prices in the two locations. These are the kinds of studies that it would be nice to see out of an architecture revisit. It begs the development of scenario simulation tools (that would make for interesting sim games for the general populace as well…).
[Update a few minutes later]
It seems entirely possible that it would be cheaper to deliver propellant from the moon to LEO via elevator/high-Isp-tanker than from the surface of the earth. That would be a real game changer, but it would wipe out much of the new market for launchers. On the other hand, in-space transportation might become so cheap that it would open up vast new markets for other things. For instance, vacation cruises to the moon become much more affordable.
[Link via Clark]