Bill Whittle has a couple new Afterburners up, one two–parter filmed out at XCOR, and the other an interview with the world’s best-known space law professor. Also, thoughts on revising the Outer Space Treaty.
Category Archives: Space
The Untold Story
…of Apollo XI. Along with an oral history.
What Should Drive The Architecture?
Jim Muncy and John Olson (NASA Intergration Directorate) in a panel on requirements.
Muncy: Wants to raise some perspectives in the context of the Augustine panel activity. Has a list of goals (not exhaustive). Not discussing current architecture. If you don’t like architecture, you might find another reason why, but that’s not the purpose of the discussion.
ESAS didn’t just happen: space policy goals and assumptions and constraints that created it. One was that it would enable human exploration for Mars. Couldn’t do moon, then Mars, because they didn’t have the money. Another was that NASA would build a transportation system that it could use for decades (“build once”). Another, from Congress, was “use Shuttle-derived workforce infrastructure and base facilities.”
Classes of goals:
Destinations: (Moon, Mars, NEO, Belt)
Strategic: Affordability, drive technology
Political: Relevance (jobs/education/environment)
Infrastructure: new industries, training
Architectural: flexibility, utilize new things
Social: more public participation
One of the constraints is that you have to make it work, including commercial and international partners. How do you transition people from Shuttle to other jobs during the gap? Not an easy problem. It’s not just rocket science, but management, and business. Manageability is a constraint.
Crew safety and separation of crew and cargo were tenets that came out of Columbia and fed into ESAS. Transition to Constellation will encompass half of the agencies budget and is a major challenge. Average age of NASA employee is 47 and Shuttle is 53, so very uneven demographic spread due to unevenness in hiring over the years. Hiring ceilings and no RIF authority makes it difficult to hire needed skills when you can only replace by attrition. Very coastally located, with hurricane risk, add risk of facilities, and fifty-state job spread of Shuttle difficult to sustain.
Muncy: What is performance? Number of people on the moon? Number of jobs created in the right states? Growth of NewSpace industry? We (the Frontier Foundation) have to come up with out own set of goals that could be a check list against Augustine options.
Asteroids
The afternoon panel on Monday is on how big the problem is, and what we can do about it.
[Update, it’s starting]
David Morrison is speaking first. He treats asteroids as enemies, while John Lewis treats them as friends. Going through arguments, and explaining what’s been happening in last few years.
Asteroid hazard is one that we can not only mitigate, but eliminate through space technology. First real awareness of hazard goes back to the Alvarez discovery that the dinosaurs were wiped out, and it was a surprise that an event that had no effect on the orbit, magnetic field, or earth itself could wipe out an ecosystem. Referring to a 1991 statement by the Congress that said we should study it internationally, and that while the risk is very small the consequences are very large, and it is a perfect charge: look at the risk, assess the threat, and figure out what to do about it.
Comes in big chunks, can go thousands of years without killing anyone, and then be catastrophic. Showing terrestrial impact frequence graph on log-log scale of megatons of energy on the X axis and frequency on the Y axis (it’s a linear relationship). Upper left is Hiroshima-size event, which occurs almost annually. Tonguska was much worse, and occurs once every few hundred years. Explosions are produced so high in the atmosphere that they don’t reach the ground, and we didn’t realize how often they occur until they got data from Air Force satellites that could see them happening. Those data were invaluable in quantifying the threat. The Air Force had stopped releasing the data a few months ago, but have started to do so again in the last week, though not to the degree of precision that they have themselves, but it’s good enough.
[Update]
D’oh!
I accidentally erased the John Lewis and part of the Morrion talk, and have no obvious way to get it back. Sorry.
More Anniversary Stuff
Unsurprisingly on this decadal anniversary, there are a lot of Apollo pieces over at The Space Review today.
Note particularly Michael Potter’s piece on the real moon hoax. This will be a main theme of my upcoming (Real Soon Now, though it’s not looking very good for making the anniversary) piece in The New Atlantis.
Shooting Gallery
Did something hit Jupiter?
It wouldn’t be surprising — it’s a big target.
Space In Hawaii
Jim Crisafulli is speaking about what’s going on in the Aloha State. Talking about yesterday’s NYT piece by Tom Wolfe about our lack of direction in space. Quotes from Tennyson’s Ulysses, “…to sail beyond the sunset.”
State of Hawaii and NASA are both fifty years old, and much Apollo training took place there, talking about telescopes on Mauna Kea, and Science City on Maui. Hawaii is one of the contenders for the new 30m telescope, and it will be announced tomorrow, planning a new solar telescope on Haleakala. U of Hawaii supports many NASA researchers. Have a space grant consortium to support education, has an Office of Aerospace Development. Have K-12 program for teaching students how to study space and astronomy. Hawaii schools part of the LCROSS telemetry team.
U of H has array of experts in adaptive optics, LIDAR/laser, remote sensing for astronomy atmostpheric/oceanic monitoring, terrestrial and coastal resource mapping. Several home-grown companies for commercial applications in these areas, including advanced air-traffic control. Working with FAA for evaluation of next-gen ATC technologies, also clean energy. Major space companies expanding outposts in Hawaii as stepping stones to Asian markets. Geographical location logical for space launch. Only state that can launch into any azimuth with no overflight. Looking at new launch modes that can improve further. Work closely with all NASA centers but most closely with Ames: here to renew agreement between Ames and the state.
Interested in space-related R&T, aerospace training and education, and commercial space launch, including space planes, sea/land-based vertical systems and airborne systems. Potential sea-launch capability based in Pearl Harbor that could ultimately take astronauts to ISS.
Working on Asian/Hawaiian consortium for space activities, focused initially on cooperation with Japan.
Working with Ames on lunar science, again to develop cooperative activities with Asia.
Passed a bill last week to get their commercial spaceport license, and hope to have a commercial license within two or three years. Also doing continued power beaming experiments from island to island as SPS demonstrators, looking at variable-buoyancy aircraft for island-island transportation, with potential for weddings at thirty-thousand feet. Also two new space tug companies forming. Encourages all to give office a call if you want to become a Hawaiian space company.
On a down note, in response to a question about job opportunities, he notes that Hawaii’s state finances are as bad as CA’s, and there are many people about to be furloughed or laid off, including himself…
A Briton Remembers Apollo
Thoughts from Andrew Stuttaford.
More NewSpace Coverage
Doug Messier has several posts. Just keep scrolling.
Gaia And Space
Are environmentalists finally coming to their senses?
ames Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory, said: “I strongly support space travel. The whole notion of Gaia came out of space travel. It seems to me any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever. That gorgeous, inspirational image of the globe that we are now so familiar with came out of space travel. That image has perhaps been of the greatest value to the environmental movement. It gave me a great impetus.
“There are the unmanned spacecraft, which are relatively inexpensive, that I certainly think should continue. The more we know about Mars, for example, the better we can understand our own planet. The second sort, the more personally adventurous sort of travel, offers great inspiration to humans. And, were it not for space travel we’d have no mobile phones, no internet, no weather forecasts of the sort we have now and so on. There’s a lot of puritanical silliness about it.”
And that doesn’t even get into the benefits of moving polluting industry off planet.