Category Archives: Space

What Is “The Bush Moon Plan”?

Whatever it is, AvWeek says that the Obama administration is going to “stick with it.”

The fiscal 2010 NASA budget outline to be released by the Obama Administration Feb. 26 adds almost $700 million to the out-year figure proposed in the fiscal 2009 budget request submitted by former President Bush, and sticks with the goal of returning humans to the moon by 2020.

Well, the story doesn’t support the headline. What they’re sticking with is the goal, not the plan (which is a description of how the goal is to be achieved). It’s hard to know whether this is good news or bad. It depends on whether or not the “plan” (i.e., Constellation/ESAS) is going to be stuck with. We still have no information about the plan.

Thoughts On COTS

…along with fixed-price versus cost-plus, appropriate payment milestones, and “skin in the game,” from Jon Goff.

We have to come up with much more innovative means of reducing the cost of access to orbit, something that Ares I doesn’t do at all. Charles Miller just became “Senior Advisor” on space commercialization with NASA’s Innovative Partnership Programs Office, so perhaps he will be able to help implement some of these kinds of ideas.

More OCO Fallout

Alan Boyle has a story on the loss of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, with an amusingly stupid comment in his comments section:

When did NASA become so political? Oh right, when the neocons filled it with “scientists” who don’t like science that refutes the Bible (that is to say, all science). F-ing crazy people. This is what happens when the cornerstones of our civilization fall before the onslaught of religion: our future falls into the ocean. Adios homo sapiens.

Yes, there was never any politics at NASA before those evil “neocons” came along.

Seriously, WTF is this person talking about? When did NASA get “filled” with “scientists” who “don’t like science that refutes the Bible”? And how did they manage to infiltrate Orbital Sciences? Did I miss that?

Do We Need A Department Of Space?

Jeff Krukin says no.

I agree. We have too many departments already. But we do need a lot better interagency coordination of space policy, something that having a space council might or might not help with. I in fact agree with his recommendations in general (though in addition to elevating the Office of Space Commerce, I would re-elevate AST back out of the FAA and have it report directly to the SECDOT, as it did when originally formed in the eighties).

Our Continuing Throwaway Space Program

Well, another satellite gets tossed into the drink instead of into orbit:

Brunschwyler said the first sign of trouble during today’s failed launch occurred about three minutes after liftoff, when the Taurus XL rocket’s telemetry showed no sign it had shed its clamshell-like payload fairing.

The fairing is a nose-mounted shroud that protects the spacecraft inside from the Earth’s atmosphere until the booster reaches space. Once it separates, launch controllers expected to see OCO and its upper stage accelerate faster since it would have shed the excess weight. But that speed boost never occurred.

“As a direct result of carrying that extra weight, we could not make orbit,” Brunschwyler said, adding that the failure ultimately sent OCO crashing into the ocean near Antarctica. “We’re fairly certain that it did not fly over any land and it landed short of Antarctica.”

Failure to separate cleanly, or at all, is one of the most common causes of a launch failure of an expendable vehicle. And because it’s expendable, like every other aspect of a launch, each fairing separation is a first one. There’s no way to test it to ensure that it will separate properly when it is supposed to.

Had this been a reusable space transport, it would have had a payload bay door that had been operated successfully many times in the past (and the vehicle would have had the performance capability to take it all the way to orbit). And if for some reason it couldn’t be opened on orbit, the mission would have been aborted, and the payload returned safely to earth to await another attempt, and a three-hundred-million-dollar satellite would have been preserved.

But instead, we continue to put up satellites on unreliable throwaway rockets that generally have much less value than the cargo, but often destroy it. And we plan to continue to do so on steroids, with the abominable plans for Constellation.

The proverbial Martian, looking at how we do spaceflight, would scratch his head at the antics of these crazy earthlings, but wouldn’t be at all surprised that we’d made so little progress in conquering his homeworld. And all because we were in such a hurry half a century ago that we decided to put up satellites with munitions.

[Update a few minutes later]

That satellite cost almost three hundred thousand dollars a pound.

There’s got to be a better way.

NASA’s Budget

Congress has finally gotten around to passing an FY09 budget for agencies operating on a continuing resolution, including NASA. Jeff Foust has the numbers. I’m not sure the last time this happened, if ever, but it actually is getting more than it requested. There is no change in manned spaceflight (Shuttle plus ISS plus Exploration) but aeronautics and science are getting a bump. As Jeff notes, this doesn’t include the extra billion that the agency gets in “stimulus.”

So, for the first time in a long time, the agency is flush, and not getting its budget cut. I guess that when the old saying has gone from “a billion here and a billion there,” to “a trillion here and a trillion there,” it gets hard to argue for fiscal discipline in any area, even one that has traditionally been contentious. It’s just a shame that so much of the money is wasted, given NASA’s current plans.

Space Billiards

There is an excellent and comprehensive discussion of the recent satellite collision over at The Space Review today. There is plenty of blame to go around, from perverse incentives in the military, to government policies that are long on rhetoric and short on funding and priority, and corporate risk taking:

It also appears that either Iridium or the JSpOC terminated the collision screening for the Iridium constellation at some point between July 2007 and the collision in February 2009, as Iridium has made repeated public statements that they did not receive any warning. Likewise, the US military has stated that they did not have any warning. The following additional comment by Campbell at the same event may shed some light as why this happened:

That said, this isn’t aviation; the Big Sky theory works [emphasis added]. We figure that the risk of a collision on any individual conjunction is about one in 50 million. However if we have 400 a week for ten years, you can do the math; clearly that risk is something bigger than zero. As I said, our coordination with JSpOC is great.

Basing the protection of the largest low Earth orbit constellation of satellites on such a theory, even when there is a significant amount of data showing that it could be false, leads one to question the decision-making process involved. Perhaps Iridium decided that they could not afford the resources to deal with the decision-making and maneuver planning to properly operate their satellites in a safe manner. If that is indeed true—and there is no known hard evidence either way—then they placed the short-term financial well being of one company over the long-term welfare of all.

Clearly, the entire international system in place for dealing with this kind of problem (to the degree that it exists at all) needs to be overhauled.