Category Archives: Space

Business, Space

The Suborbital Space Race

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Doug Messier has an analysis of the differences between Virgin Galactic and XCOR’s approach to commercial human spaceflight. A couple nits:

A year after the accident, Scaled brought in SpaceDev to assist with the engine development. The Powoy, Calif.-based company had built the propulsion system for SpaceShipOne, but Scaled subsequently decided to bring the engine development in-house. Bringing back SpaceDev was a tacit admission that this decision had not been a wise one.

It’s not quite that simple. There is some dispute as to who the actual engine provider for SS1 was, and SpaceDev certainly didn’t do it on its own. And one reason that they didn’t get the follow-on work was a rumored falling out between Burt Rutan and Jim Benson, founder and then-head of SpaceDev. In addition to the accident, I would assume that one of the reasons that SpaceDev and Scaled are working together again is a result of Jim’s departure from the company almost three years ago (subsequentprior to his recent death).

Also,

XCOR’s gradual approach – flying a small vehicle commercially, then building something larger – is what Scaled Composites might have done absent the involvement of Virgin Galactic. Branson’s company brought the customer experience to the forefront, which led to the development of a much larger – and more complicated – space plane.

It’s not at all clear what Scaled would have done (if anything) absent Virgin’s involvement. It’s unlikely they would have operated the vehicle on their own — that’s not the business they’re in, and they wouldn’t have developed it any further with their own money, because that’s not what they do. They build airplanes to other people’s specifications. Perhaps if Branson hadn’t stepped forward, Paul Allen might have started a passenger business, but we’ll never know now.

Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Not Guilty?

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There is evidence that the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs:

New clues at other sites in Mexico showed that the extinction must have occurred 300,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and that even larger asteroids may not be the purveyors of doom they’re thought to be, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society by researchers from Princeton, New Jersey, and Lausanne, Switzerland.

“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”

Maybe. But even if true, it’s not an excuse to ignore the problem. Being hit by one of these things will mean a bad day, and maybe a bad decade, depending on its size and strike location. Tonguska was only a hundred years ago, and if it were to hit a populated area (e.g., the eastern Seaboard) today, it would be more devastating than a nuclear blast (minus the radiation), potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people. Even if it didn’t wipe out species, you can bet that anything that can create a crater over a hundred miles across wiped out a lot of life. We should still be investing a lot more than we are to become spacefaring, and prevent a repeat.

And what’s frustrating is that we wouldn’t even necessarily have to spend more money. We’d just have to spend NASA’s budget smarter. But that wouldn’t keep the jobs in the right districts.

[Update a few minutes later]

I wonder if this topic will come up at the Planetary Defense Conference. Looks interesting — wish I could attend. A. C. Charania is blogging it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Or maybe we shouldn’t waste all this money on planetary defense, and just get the president to apologize and make peace with the solar system.

Political Commentary, Space

NASA Administrator Update

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Jeff Foust has a good roundup of the critical issues that are becoming more urgent (what to do about Shuttle and Constellation) and the current rumors.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a lot more from Chris Bergin. This seems like great news, if true:

General Peter Worden, Director of NASA’s Ames Research Center (ARC), will also spearhead a NASA review, which is deemed to have “wide scope” – likely to include shuttle extension – while a main body “Blue Ribbon Panel” will work with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in Washington, possibly overseeing all of the studies.

Jim Muncy was hinting at this a couple weeks ago at Space Access. What I don’t understand is what’s been taking them so long to get this under way. It could have happened back in February, and they’d be done by now.

Media Criticism, Space

Bad PR, In My Opinion

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Scaled has issued a press release in response to Rob Coppinger’s speculations about Monday’s rudder-dragging incident that raises new questions. What do they mean when they say:

…you should question the motivations of a publication that reports design or flight test information that is based only on speculation.

Why should we question them? What will it gain us to do so? What “motives” are they implying here?

Also, my understanding is that Rob posted this at his blog, which presumably has less rigorous standards than a Flight Global article, and is exactly the place to do the same kind of speculating that we all were (though I didn’t blog about it).

This seems like an unjustified slam at Rob, with no basis, other than that they’re upset about his speculations. I doubt if it will change his reporting or attitude toward Scaled in the future, but this doesn’t seem like very good press relations to me, and I just don’t understand their purpose in doing this. As Clark says, it would have been a lot better had they left off that last sentence. Also, as Jeff says, that’s why they call them “test flights.”

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Solar System Day

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Regular readers know that I hate the earth and the environment.

Well, not really, but I’d imagine that some of the more deluded among them believe that. And I am opposed to many so-called environmentalists. But it’s not an anti-environment position so much as an anti-anti-humanity and anti-anti-free market position.

So I do have trouble getting into Earth Day. I find the notion far too blinkered and unimaginative.

Yes, earth is special and, as we learned over forty years ago (shortly before the first Earth Day), looks like a very precious and fragile jewel against the black background of an unimaginably vast, sterile and hostile universe.

But it’s just one planet of uncountably many, and we don’t just live on a planet, we live in a solar system, a galaxy, a universe. In fact, while there’s an implicit recognition of this in the worship of the sun by the renewable energy types, they’re insufficiently open minded about the use of the rest of the system as a source of resources whose harvesting would be much gentler on the planet than mining them here, if it could be done cost effectively.

I’d like to see Earth Day used as a platform to focus a lot more attention on the environmental benefits that space technology has brought us over the past half century, from data gathering on deforestation and pollution, communications that allow less business travel and more telecommuting, to space-based navigation that saves fuel and lives. I’d also like to see consideration of the even greater future potential for saving the planet via space.

I actually do share the goal of the anti-humans of wanting to reduce the environmental burden of humanity on the planet, and I don’t even necessarily object to the goal of reducing the terrestrial population, as long as we can dramatically increase the extraterrestrial human population, because I’m one of those people who think that human minds are the ultimate resource, and that you can’t have too many of them. But the way to achieve that goal is to open up space, not to simply reduce the human population on earth, by whatever means necessary (and many of these folks think that end will justify any means).

Back in the seventies, many of the L-5ers were hippies who recognized the peaceful potential of space colonization to gently depopulate the earth and make it into a giant natural park, with the vast bulk of humanity living and producing off planet the wealth, via industrial-intensive processes, that would make such a thing affordable. I wasn’t a hippy, but I thought then, and still think, that a wonderful ultimate goal.

But the means to achieve it are not more constraints and taxes on current energy use, or population. It is to deploy technologies that can actually achieve the goal — nuclear, molecular manufacturing, fusion (if we can do it), and low-cost space access, which might eventually make space solar power and extraction of other extraterrestrial resources for use on earth economically feasible.

Golda Meir once said that there would be peace in the Middle East when the Arabs started to love their children more than they hated the Jews. Similarly, the planet will be saved when many of the watermelons who claim to care for it start to love it more than they hate humans, freedom, individualism and technology.

[Thursday morning update]

Save the humans:

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency did bravely move forward by finding that things like smokestacks and breathing — or anything related to greenhouse gases — endanger the public health and welfare. And since the EPA can now regulate CO2, it can have a say in nearly everything we do with little regard for silly distractions like economic tradeoffs…

…What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.

This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?

Well, that assumes that Henry Waxman is reasonable or responsible, when the available evidence indicates otherwise.

[Bumped]