Category Archives: Space

Business, Space

Return Trip

2 Comments

Jeff Foust has an interview with Charles Simonyi, who is about to become the first space tourist (and unlike many, he doesn’t dislike the phrase) to do it again.

There are two interesting points to me. First:

If you look at professional astronauts and cosmonauts, it’s astounding how many of them fly multiple times. It was something I never quite understood: I would see the same names again and again, and I would wonder why this person is flying again when there are others who would probably want to fly too.

The answer is that space agencies see that people with experience do much better. The “start up” time on that first flight takes away so much from the overall performance compared to the second and third flights. The top ten people have 60 flights among themselves, which is a lot of flights. It shows that, with experience, you can do so much better. In my case, I hope to accomplish more, in terms of experiments and amateur radio communications with schools and so on.

To me, while you obviously want to use the best candidates for a mission costing hundreds of millions of dollars, this validates the theory that George Abbey grew the astronaut office to a high surplus in order to maintain control over them, by forcing competition among them for the limited flights available.

As for the frustration of some in the space community with these millionaires who buy rides for themselves, but don’t otherwise help the nascent industry with their millions:

I’m not an investor, I’m a customer of these industries. I recommend it to everyone else to be a customer. Whether it’s a good investment is a completely different question, and one I’m not qualified to talk about.

Well, we do need customers, so he is playing a key role. It’s just a shame that, at least for now, “everyone else” can’t afford it. So we’ll need investors too.

[Monday evening update]

Here’s another interview with Simonyi over at Popular Science.

Political Commentary, Space

Space Policy “Tensions”?

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Rob Coppinger is hearing some rumours (if I had heard them, they’d be rumors) of dissension within the White House over the NASA administrator pick, apparently over whether or not to put a retired general in charge (at least two of the candidates, and perhaps three are). It could be that the space people favor it, but that other administration members are anti-military, but that’s purely speculation (though not an unreasonable one, knowing the types of people who would be in this administration). He also thinks that it could be a year before the administration pays much attention to NASA. Which makes all of the transition activity on the subject somewhat puzzling.

Political Commentary, Space

Space Is Really Big

25 Comments

But not quite big enough:

In an unprecedented space collision, a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a presumably defunct Russian Cosmos satellite ran into each other Tuesday above northern Siberia, creating a cloud of wreckage, officials said today.

What a mess. At that altitude, the pieces are going to be there a long time, and present a hazard to other LEO satellites. I hope that this isn’t the event that sets off a cascade. I don’t understand why NORAD didn’t predict this. I know they don’t have the elements to a precision necessary to know that they’ll collide, but I would think that they could propagate enough to see that they would come close. And if we had true operationally responsive space capability, we could have sent something up to change the orbit of one of them, if they couldn’t do it themselves. This is the price we pay for not being a truly spacefaring civilization, despite the billions wasted over the past decades.

[Update in the evening]

Clark Lindsey has more links, and thoughts.

[Thursday morning update]

The Orlando Sentinel was somewhat prescient about this story, having run a piece on space debris last weekend.

[Mid-morning update]

Clark Lindsey has several more links.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Goodie

12 Comments

Iran will have enough fuel for several Hiroshima-level bombs by the end of the year.

I should note that their ability to put a satellite into space isn’t quite as concerning to me as it has been portrayed by some in the news. Though we had ICBMs before we had launch vehicles, it doesn’t follow that having a launch vehicle implies ICBM capability. It’s actually a lot easier, from a guidance standpoint, to put an object into orbit than it is to hit a target precisely. Also, warhead and entry vehicle technology is a completely different beast than a launcher, so simply having throw capability doesn’t mean that you have all of the pieces in place. In addition, it’s one thing to build a bomb — it’s another to make it small enough to be able to loft it around the world.

Of course, none of this is of much consolation to Israel, because it’s a lot closer, and I would imagine that the Iranians are indifferent to how precisely they can kill hundreds of thousands of Jews.

Political Commentary, Space

What Could Go Wrong?

14 Comments

The Orion spacecraft will have to be operated with remotes, due to the vibration environment. In addition to the introduction of a new comm failure mode (will it be IR, Bluetooth, what?) there’s the other problem noted in comments over there: “Time to deorbit. What did you do with the remote?” And all (as another commenter notes) because NASA thought it would be a dandy idea to have a huge solid first stage.

I wonder if they would even be considering this if it weren’t for the vibration problem?

Space

Increasing Lunar Mission Frequencies

6 Comments

Jon Goff has a proposal for doing lunar missions with a bi-elliptic transfer. It makes a lot of sense, actually, for Low Lunar Orbit, or deep space, though I’m not sure there’s any benefit for a Lagrange point, because the plane change out at that distance doesn’t cost much anyway (one of the many reasons that I find Lagrange points preferable to LLO).

The basic idea is to do the plane change at a very high altitude. In fact, this is a technique that can make sense even for LEO plane changes, if they’re big enough. I forget where the crossover is, but there is a certain amount of plane change where it is actually cheaper to go out to GEO (or higher) and back than to do it with a single burn in LEO. We looked at it a lot back in the eighties when we were doing tug studies.