Tom Jones, on the asteroid threat.
We really need to get moving on that spacefaring civilization thing. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen under current NASA management.
Category Archives: Space
Did The Chinese Fake Their EVA?
I don’t know, and haven’t watched the video myself, but some Chinese bloggers think so:
Two seconds into the video from CCTV, bubble-like objects rose from the hatch as it sprung open. At 5 min 49 second, a bubble attached to the astronaut’s helmet. At 6 min 42 seconds, bubbles swiftly came out of the cabin. On the left corner of the video, bubbles gushed out at an angle at 7 min 17 seconds into the video.
A blogger, who is a physicist, commented in a Chinese Epoch Times article that, assuming the operation was conducted in the water, the bubbles rose faster than they would have if the water was not propelled using a wave-blower. Wave blowers are commonly used in underwater space-training exercises to simulate the weightlessness of space.
It wouldn’t shock me.
New NewSpace Blogger
Though not a new space blog. Occasional commenter John Hare is now rocket blogging over at Selenian Boondocks (which has a new URL and look).
Is Usenet Dead?
Apparently not yet, but as far as my usage of it is concerned, it’s on life support. As the article points out, it doesn’t help that ISPs don’t support it properly. I gave up on AT&T once I realized that they’d outsourced it, and basically didn’t care whether it worked for their customers or not, and use GigaNews now.
Anyway, my biggest use of Usenet is sci.space.*, but I’ve cut way back on my participation there, because the signal/noise ratio has gotten so low, with many of the best long-time members of the newsgroups having gone to greener pastures (for example, Henry Spencer hasn’t posted there in many moons, which is a little ironic, considering that whenever I used to point out that Usenet was dying, he would reply that people have been predicting the death of Usenet for decades). It’s mostly loonytunes now, like Brad Guth and Ian Parker, and the Elifritz troll, with little substantive space policy discussion. I do think that the center of gravity of serious space discussion has shifted to the web, regardless of whatever else is still happening with NNTP.
The Bankruptcy Of Iceland
Thomas James has some space-related thoughts.
Clueless Space Commentary
Jeff Foust has a roundup.
And as I note over there in comments, the Kennedy myth persists:
“Not since John F. Kennedy, has a president truly understood the incalculable value of space…”
Not even then…
Space Weather
We’re going to be hit by an asteroid tonight. The angle is such that it will just be a spectacular fireball. But it’s nice that we’re finally getting to a position from which we can predict these things. The next step is to be able to prevent them, if necessary. Too bad that almost nothing that NASA is doing is contributing to that, at least with the manned spaceflight program.
Space Power Beaming Concept Proof
On p.38 of this presentation, there’s a breakdown of the contributions to the cost of Space Solar Power (SSP). Not surprisingly, the installation is more than half of the cost and another 20% is manufacturing cost of the solar array.
If we extract out the solar generation from SSP and instead of an antenna, have a passive microwave reflector, we can potentially get the cost of the reflector down to less than $1 billion. Let’s say it’s a flat spinning <8 gram per square meter perforated mylar single-mission heavy payload to GEO straw man. If we spend $1 billion on a ground-based microwave antenna and another $1 billion on a rectenna, we have a 1 GW system that can function as transmission for a 40-year straight-line cost of 1.5 cents/kwh which is about 30% of the cost of SSP per watt with the viable scale of capital needed much smaller. (If you need a VC return, the price must be closer to ten cents per kwh.) The reflector would not be at capacity so additional transmission can be achieved for 2/3 of that. 1 GW beaming for $3 billion would be a pretty satisfying proof of concept. There's plenty of power on the ground to beam to space that's cheap so the proof of concept can be economically viable at this scale. At Hawaii's buy price of more than $0.30/kwh and New Mexico's sell price of less than $0.10/kwh it would pay for itself pretty fast. Space power beaming would therefore be shown to be economically viable without the space generation and thus be valuable as a proof of concept for transmission alone.
Simonyi’s Announcement
There’s going to be a press conference at 11:30 this morning to announce his return visit to ISS. Jeff Foust plans to live blog it.
[Afternoon update]
Here is the site for the live blogging. Unfortunately, he seems to be blogging it in lorem ipsum, and I’ve never learned to read that language. Maybe he’ll have an English version up later.
Obama’s Space Pro-Activity
The Obama campaign seems to have gotten way out front of the McCain campaign on space. The problem is that, like its domestic policy in general, McCain doesn’t seem to have a coherent policy with regard to civil space. He’s going to freeze discretionary, which includes NASA, and whether NASA will be exempt seems to depend on which campaign aide you ask. And regardless of how much money is spent, the campaign is equally vague on how it is spent, and what the near-term and long-term goals of the expenditure are. On top of that, the McCain campaign has lumped in the new Obama proposal to increase the NASA budget by two billion with a lot of so-called liberal spending proposals. As Jeff Foust notes, it’s a little mind blowing, politically.
Obama, after having gotten off on the wrong foot with the initial idiotic proposal to delay Constellation to provide funds for education, seems to have actually gotten inside McCain’s OODA loop on this issue. The McCain campaign really needs a smart political adviser in this area (as Obama apparently has now with Lori Garver, who seems to successfully jumped ship from Hillary’s campaign), but there’s no evidence that they’ve come up with one yet.
Of course, it’s not an issue on which the election will hang, probably not even in Florida.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s a little more at NASA Watch. It seems to be a disconnect between the McCain campaign and the RNC. Which, of course, doesn’t make it any better, or excuse it.
[Another update a few minutes later]
Well, this would seem to clarify the McCain position:
Perhaps more important were McCain’s remarks on Wednesday that only the Pentagon and veterans would see a budget increase in his administration because of the high price the proposed economic bail out. Everything else – including, presumably, NASA — will be frozen or cut. Several space advocates in Florida and Washington DC expect the worst.
As I said, it isn’t clear that space will be a key issue, even in Florida. But if the McCain campaign position is that the budget is going to be frozen, they should at least put forth a description of how they expect, and will require, NASA’s priorities to change to accommodate it. So far, there’s zero evidence that they’ve even given the matter any thought.