SpaceX is lobbying for COTS D funding to be included in the stimulus. It would be nice to see something worthwhile included in it, but it’s not enough to make it worth it to me. I’d rather have no stimulus and no COTS D.
Category Archives: Space
Goodie
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.
What Could Go Wrong?
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?
Increasing Lunar Mission Frequencies
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.
Get Out Your Apogee Wrenches
Here’s what looks to be a great site for orbital mechanics, with lots of software, free and otherwise.
Can Obama Ban Space Weapons?
Some thoughts from (space lawyer) Glenn Reynolds.
Is Space The Next Frontier?
Nader Elhefnawy remains skeptical. But I think he misses one of the strongest drivers, only mentioning it once, almost in passing:
Such miseries as famine, war, and persecution cannot be ruled out in the future, of course, but they are hardly a likely driver of space development. In fact, given the extraordinary economic demands that any space development effort will make, it may be much more practical for a prospering world than one suffering through such disasters to undertake such efforts in any foreseeable future.
Emphasis mine. One of these things is not like the other. One can have persecution in the midst of prosperity, and that combination may well result in emigration, just as it did from England to the Americas in the seventeenth century, and from the American east to Utah in the nineteenth. I think that a combination of a desire for freedom in concert with evolving technology is the most likely driver for human migration into space. Unless we’ve all uploaded ourselves first.
[Late morning update]
Clark Lindsey doesn’t buy Elhefnawy’s thesis:
If there existed large O’Neill habitats today, there would be no problem in attracting tens of thousands or even a few million people to move to them. The number will depend on the cost of getting there but when talking about a fraction of a percent of the world’s population, you can find that many people to do virtually anything. The excitement of building a new world in the new environment of space will be charm enough to attract large numbers of people.
Of course, the trick is finding a way of getting from where we are today to a point where building large habitats becomes feasible. I agree that such progress will not be attained by individuals heading out into the last frontier in their own spaceships. But that does not mean that individual action is not the essential element in making it happen. Even if one buys the revisionist view that the expansion into the American West was primarily due to “railroads and speculators, [] logging companies and mining concerns”, one should remember the fact that these organizations were made up of individuals who took huge personal risks. Many, if not most, of those companies and concerns failed and took down all the individuals involved with them. Similarly today the individuals involved in a private entrepreneurial space start-up are taking huge risks with their careers and investments. Many, if not most, of those firms will fail. The people involved know the risks but they make the effort anyway. That is the nature of tough endeavors on earth and it is the same for space.
Of course, perhaps the biggest question is whether modern culture and government will allow, let alone encourage, such risk taking.
What Should NASA Do?
Go take the poll. I picked the last choice, but I think that Clark must have voted for the penultimate one. But between the two of them, they currently grab about sixty percent of the vote. The others are mostly down in the noise. Don’t expect the powers that be to pay any attention, though.
Oh, and here’s the official NASA version. Note which options are missing. Steve Gonzales has thoughts, and asks for input.
Penny Wise, Billions Foolish
As Clark Lindsey notes, even if we can believe the Probabilistic Risk Analysis that declares Ares “twice as safe” as an EELV (of course, to do that, we’d have to first actually see it…), that’s a pretty pathetic safety improvement considering the billions of dollars and many years that it will cost us. Considering how high the operational costs will be, it’s not likely to fly very much, anyway (I can’t see more than a four lunar missions a year, given the the budget likely to be available at the outrageous per-mission cost for the Constellation architecture). So the difference between, say, 0.999 and 0.995 is likely to be academic. Particularly when most of the hazards in a lunar mission occur after orbit has been attained. I am increasingly less and less impressed by Mike Griffin’s vaunted intelligence, and don’t miss him as administrator, even if he’s never replaced.
Speaking of which, this is indicative either of how disconnected with policy the president’s press secretary is, or how low a priority space policy is (and perhaps some depressing combination of the two):
“Q: Robert, the James A. Baker Institute is recommending that the Obama administration defer another lunar shot, and instead focus on energy and climate change. Does the White House have a reaction on that?
MR. GIBBS: I don’t have anything particularly from — I would point you to folks over at NASA. I don’t have any particular guidance on that.”
What would the “folks over at NASA” know about it? Policy has to come from the White House, but so far, it seems lacking. Clearly the administration is (over)interested in energy and climate change, but to set that up as an alternative to a “lunar shot” is a false choice. Of course, characterizing VSE as a “lunar shot” is simply a display of ignorance on the part of the questioner, but I suspect that this will be representative of the clueless quality of the space policy debate to come. If there is one.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Oh, and just in case you thought that Ares 1 didn’t have enough technical problems, here’s a new one — post-staging recontact:
This so-called recontact problem could end an Ares I mission – possibly catastrophically – during ascent. Failure could come seconds after firing of the separation pyrotechnics, if the upper stage’s J-2X engine does not provide enough power fast enough to stop it from slowing down and colliding with the first stage and its motor, which would still be providing residual thrust.
This is what caused SpaceX’ third failure. It will be a lot harder for NASA to solve, though.
SpaceX had the problem because they made a change to their first-stage propulsion that resulted in a slightly longer thrust tailoff than they expected. It was solved by simply decreasing the delay between separation and upper-stage ignition.
NASA doesn’t have this option, necessarily, because there are relatively large dispersions in thrust tailoff for an SRB, so it may be hard to find an optimal and reliable delay duration between separation and ignition. This wasn’t a problem for Shuttle because it doesn’t actually stage — it does a parallel burn, and the SSMEs are already at full thrust when the solids separate, and it can easily outrun them. But now, since they’ve come up with the brilliant concept of a solid first stage with an air-start second, they have a new serious risk in the program. And Ares-1X will tell them absolutely nothing about how to solve it.
[Update a few minutes later]
One more point. I’d like Dr. Griffin to tell us what he thinks an astronaut’s life is worth. Because clearly it’s not infinite. He has decided that making it twice as safe is worth billions, but even then, it’s not “safe” in absolute terms (because nothing is, this side of the grave). So we’ve established what he is — one of those heartless bastards who are willing to kill astronauts to pinch pennies. Now we’re just haggling over the price. I’d like to know what it is, though clearly, it’s a lot higher than my own estimate.
Dog Bites Man
You will be as shocked as I was to hear that Bob Zubrin thinks that we should stimulate the economy by sending people to Mars.