Category Archives: Space

Political Commentary, Space

NASA Administrator Update

13 Comments

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

1 Comment

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

10 Comments

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]

Media Criticism, Space

Confusing

4 Comments

Andy Pasztor has an article at the Journal today about NASA’s budget problems that is very misleading in its use of the word “Constellation.” For instance:

By casting doubt on Constellation’s progress, the report may provide ammunition for lawmakers and others hoping to extend the life of the shuttle past its current retirement date of 2010. Extending the life of the shuttle could reduce the gap between the last shuttle flight and the initial operation of Constellation. Lockheed Martin Corp. is the prime contractor for the project.

No, Lockheed Martin is not the prime contractor for Constellation, which consists of a number of system elements, starting with the Ares 1 launcher and Orion capsule. LM is only prime for the Orion. ATK is the lead for the Ares 1.

And then he writes:

Accelerating Constellation to 2013, as some inside NASA have advocated, would require significantly larger budget hikes, according to the report. NASA officials project the total cost for Constellation at around $30 billion

It’s not “accelerating Constellation,” which won’t be complete for many years, as it includes things like the Ares V heavy lifter, earth departure stages, the Altair lunar lander, etc., development of which haven’t even begun. It’s only accelerating Ares/Orion, which is what is required to close the dreaded “gap” (assuming that they don’t instead just do COTS D and hope that SpaceX comes through with Falcon 9 and Dragon).

And there’s no way that the total cost for “Constellation” will be only thirty billion. The GAO recently estimated that Ares 1 alone is going to cost at least seventeen billion, and Orion was going to cost at least twenty, with top estimates of twenty and twenty-nine respectively, which would mean close to fifty billion for Ares/Orion alone (and that’s just development costs — it excludes operations).

With all the numbers floating around out there, it’s easy to get things confused, but the words do mean things. Ares/Orion are not Constellation — they are a subset of it and only the first planned elements.

Political Commentary, Space

Mike’s Whining

15 Comments

Dr. Griffin made a speech at the Goddard Memorial dinner last week when he received the Goddard Trophy. Jeff Foust has a report of the highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view). There’s a lot of good discussion in comments (in which Mark Whittington makes a fool of himself by ignorantly slandering people like Steve Isakowitz), including the recent release of the Aerospace report that indicates what anyone with half a lick of sense already knew — that it would be much faster and cheaper to modify EELVs for human exploration than to develop a whole new launch system. I think that this report will hammer the final nail in the coffin of the Ares 1, particularly since it was produced at NASA request. And, like someone in comments at Space Politics, I find Mike’s statements flabbergasting:

Your viewgraphs will always be better than my hardware. A fictional space program will always be faster, better, and cheaper than a real space program.

So let’s get this straight. Ares 1, which won’t be operational for several years in the most optimistic scenario, is “hardware,” but Atlas V and Delta IV, which have flown multiple times, are “view graphs”? Jon Goff is amazed and appalled as well.

Political Commentary, Space, Space Science

Our Vision, Not Yours

24 Comments

Clark Lindsey points out this article in The Atlantic about a new attempt by the Planetary Society to launch a solar sail. He also points out Ann Druyan’s and Lou Friedman’s obvious disdain for millionaires more interested in going into space themselves than developing technology or sending robots.

…she can’t get over the general timidity and lack of imagination she keeps encountering, and she’s particularly aghast at the scads of cash some ego-tripping big-money men seem willing to spend on personal space tourism: “Isn’t the whole planet enough for them?” Google’s Sergey Brin—whose company the project also appealed to, unsuccessfully, years ago—is yet another billionaire who hopes to romp around in orbit….

…“Basically, you’re asking somebody to fund an idea,” Friedman admits. He has good science at his back. But if 50 years ago Slava Linkin could not have imagined the disappearance of the U.S.S.R., it’s fair to say that Friedman would not have imagined his own country, the Cold War’s victor, with a space agency so blinkered and elephantine that he has to mount a long guerrilla operation to get his plausible vision off the ground.

He has had the same bellyful of talk about private entrepreneurial funding that Ann Druyan has, and he shares her contempt for the thrill-seeking, space-touring fat cats. But even so, a fundamental optimism survives in him, nourished not just by faith but by disbelief: “You come back to that $4 million, and the chance to take the first step to the stars—how can that not be funded?”

Well, Lou, one way might be that the “fat cats” don’t appreciate being publicly denigrated because they have different priorities than you and Ann do.

I hope that the sail gets funded — it’s a critical technology for the future that could result in reduced costs of doing solar system exploration (and maybe even interstellar, though that’s a much tougher problem). And I can understand their frustration — four million is a rounding error in the Constellation overrun, and in the new currency, in which we could express a mere trillion dollars as a “barack,” it’s only four microbaracks, a drop in the celestial bucket, and couch-cushion change inside the Beltway.

But it makes no more sense to curse millionaires who choose to spend their money on space trips than it does to curse Bill and Melinda Gates because they have better things to do with their money. I suspect that they’re upset with Brin and the others because they think that they should get it, because they’re so close — they’re interested in space — but they don’t quite. It’s probably in their minds a so-close-and-yet-so-far thing, and they view them as traitors to the cause because their space vision is flawed.

But no, Ann. For some, this “whole planet” is not enough. And it’s not enough for you, either. The difference is that you’re satisfied to send a robot emissary out, while others view that as in itself lacking vision. I could be just as churlish as you, and complain that you didn’t spend your studio’s money on developing space tourism, which will grow a large enough market to drop launch costs and improve reliability, so that projects like this solar sail would become much more affordable, and have a better chance of getting to orbit than the first failed attempt. But unlike you, I recognize that people have different visions, and that they’re not mine doesn’t make them wrong, and that their money is theirs to spend as they wish. But the latter notion has apparently gone quite out of fashion in our brave new world of ever-increasing collectivism.

[Update a while later]

I also find it amusing that she considers people who want to go into space “timid” and “lacking imagination.” Apparently her irony detector is on the fritz.

Business, Space

Falcon One Problems?

2 Comments

Via email from Jim Oberg comes this story from Malaysia:

The launch of the RazakSAT, Malaysia’s second remote sensing satellite has been postponed until further notice due to “technical problems”.

Due for lift-off on April 21, Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry secretary-general Datuk Abdul Hanan Alang Endut said the delay was because of problems with the launching vehicle.

The vehicle, Falcon 1, belonging to a company Space Exploration Technology (SpaceX), is to lift off the satellite from the launching pad at Omelek Island, Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Island.

Abdul Hanan said SpaceX will be doing the repairs which will take at least six weeks.

There’s nothing visible on the SpaceX’s front page about a delay. They list the launch date for the Malaysian ATSB as “2009.” I assume that’s the same bird.

History, Space, Technology and Society

Space Nuclear Waste Disposal

6 Comments

When I wrote that piece about Three-Mile Island the other week, I forgot to mention my own recollections of the event. It was interesting timing, because it happened in the middle of a senior space systems engineering project that I was involved with at the University of Michigan. It was an annual course taught in the Aerospace Engineering department, required for Aerospace majors, which I took as an elective (though it wasn’t my major, I took many courses there, including several graduate ones, tailoring my own astronautical engineering degree, but without the emphasis on aeronautics). The course was taught by Harm Buning (who died only three years ago — I really ought to write about him some time). The project was to figure out how to dispose of nuclear waste in space. This was a couple years before the Shuttle had its first flight, and we still believed the hype about its cost and safety, so it was the assumed launch vehicle, but the question was what to do with the stuff once it was in LEO.

Having been pretty heavily involved with the L-5 Society (I had actually spent a semester the previous year volunteering at the HQ in Tucson, and had met people involved with the MIT mass driver work, including Henry Kolm and Eric Drexler — the people in that now-classic picture are, from right to left, a twenty-four year-old bearded Eric wearing a Maxwell’s equations teeshirt (one of which I also had at the time), Henry, Gerry O’Neill, someone unknown to me, and Kevin Fine — geek and space enthusiast city — I could write a sad book titled “We Were Space Enthusiasts, And Young…), I suggested that we use a linear synchronous motor to propel it out of the solar system. The class adopted the idea, and we came up with a crude systems design (about what you could expect from college seniors for such a complex project). It was in the middle of the project that TMI occurred, making it seem even more relevant.

The university seems to have put many of these older (typed by department secretaries– no word processors back then) reports on line, including this one. I’m sure I have a dead-tree copy somewhere, but it’s nice to see it on the web. It’s been a long time, and I was distracted at the time because my father had his second heart attack in April of that year, and died a few weeks later. Due to time missed, I had to finish up my sections early in the summer to avoid an Incomplete for the course, so I don’t remember how much of it and which parts I wrote, but it was quite a bit of it (at least the orbital mechanics and the dynamics of the payloads in the accelerator, and how much wall play they would have to have). Dave Steigmann wrote a lot of the structures section, I think. The report says that it’s authored by Kevin Blankinship, but he was probably just final editor, because he was officially the team project manager. One of the things that this course taught was not just engineering, but how to work as an engineering team (including managing with the politics and personal interactions). These were…interesting. I won’t say any more than that, to protect the guilty, whoever they all may be. 😉

Anyway, is it feasible? Probably not, but it was a good project for the purpose of learning how to consider all aspects of a space system, and project teamwork.

[Update a while later]

The project name was pretty good acronymery. I don’t recall whether it was mine, someone else’s, or the result of a brainstorming session. But it was Project NEWDUMP (Nuclear Energy Waste Disposal Using Mass-Driver Propulsion).

For anyone who is willing to read the thing, it is probably entertainingly rife with howlers, from the perspective of three decades later. This one on page four jumped off the page at me:

The Space Shuttle has substantially reduced the cost of space transportation since the Apollo project, with possible improvements for further economy.

Note the tense, and not also that this was written about two years before first flight.