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Category Archives: Space
She’s Dead, Jim
Majel Barrett Roddenberry has trekked her last star. Condolences to friends and family.
Congrats To Gwynne Shotwell
She’s just been named president of SpaceX. Interestingly, they didn’t have a president before (and the page hasn’t been updated yet). Well, they do now.
I think that she’ll do a good job. When I first met her, years ago, she was Gwynne Gurevich, and an engineer at Microcosm. She’s come a long way. And with all due respect to the competition, she’s got to be the hottest space company president ever. She may have to wear her skirts a little lower now, though.
Valve Problem Solved
John Carmack has a new post up describing what he thinks is the reason for the Pixel failure a few weeks ago at the LLC.
Our systems run the propellant valves through a set of relays controlled by a watchdog microcontroller, which drives the valves closed if the main computer doesn’t continuously toggle a keep-alive signal bit. We found that with the valves on the bench, we could get interruptions to the current when we tapped on the relays in the electronics box. We believe that acoustic vibrations from the operating rocket engine could cause the contacts on the relay to intermittently lose contact.
A couple points. First, this demonstrates the need to test components in their operating environment. But more importantly, these are the kinds of things that you learn only with a lot of experience and testing, something that NASA can’t afford to do with their vehicles because a) they throw them away after each flight and b) they’re as expensive as hell. That’s why reusable vehicles, and approaches like Armadillo’s and XCOR’s hold the key to both low cost, and reliability, goals that NASA will never achieve with their current approach.
Ray LaHood?
That’s the latest rumor for SecDOT. I’m looking at his committee assignments from when he was in Congress, and see nothing to indicate any expertise or knowledge of transportation issues. The only relevance that the NYT points out is that he’s overseen pork transportation projects on the Appropriations Committee (my characterization, not theirs). And he’s a Republican. But he’s from Illinois. And he’s of Arabic (Christian) descent.
Is this just a token to show bipartisanship by the incoming administration? I have no idea what this implies (if anything) for space transportation regulation. I’d be willing to be that he’s never given it a moment’s thought, which can be both good and bad. It’s good in the sense that he won’t come in with any agenda, but he’ll have to be educated. I’d like to know if he has any natural tendencies when it comes to regulation in general.
[Thursday morning update]
Here’s more on LaHood. Apparently he does have some history in dealing with aviation/airport issues, but nothing about space or spaceports.
105 Years
Top Ten Technology Predictions
Lousy ones, that is. I think we may be able to add this one to the list:
The Crew Exploration Vehicle, the associated Crew Launch Vehicle, and later the Heavy Lift Vehicle, will be the 21st century space equivalent of our interstate highways. This is the core infrastructure that will enable us to travel from the surface of the Earth to the Moon, Mars, and the near-Earth asteroids.
This kind of space travel is utter bilge.
[Via Geek Press]
If Mike Griffin Had Been Columbus
Perhaps Mark Whittington is right. We should have followed the path blazed by the early Iberian explorers:
Toledo, New Castille. March 1492.
Today Don Miguel de Grifo, the head of the Royal Transatlantic Exploring Administration, made the eagerly awaited announcement as to how the Administration would pursue Their Majesties’ Vision for Transatlantic Exploration. To the disappointment of some, he turned down the suggestion of the Italian explorer Columbus that the program utilize already-existing, commercially-available caravels staged from the Canary Islands. “The Administration has no means of Atlantic-rating these craft safely. Spanish lives are too precious to be wasted in this endeavor. Furthermore,” he added, “the idea of staging the voyages in the Canary Islands is too complicated, and I fear that constructing the necessary docks and shipyards in the Canaries might become too expensive, even though they would then enable further voyages more cheaply.”
Advocates protested, saying “If you’re in the Canaries, you’re halfway to anywhere in the Atlantic,” citing the favorable winds prevailing from that spot. de Grifo responded “That is true, and someday we will build docks in the Canaries. But for now, we must sail directly from Spain to China, and the ships must be large enough to carry all supplies needed for the entire voyage.”
Rather than going with the commercially-available caravels, de Grifo announced that the Royal Galley Arsenal of Barcelona would build an existing design of a large war galley. “Galleys are a tried-and-true technology that has worked for centuries.” He denied that the Count of Barcelona had demanded that the Arsenal be used to provide the ships for the expedition as a price of political support for the plan in the Cortes. “We are doing this because it is technologically the right thing to do. Simple. Safe. Soon.” Questions about what had caused his change of position versus his previous support of caravels several years prior went unanswered.
Barcelona, Aragon. July 1494.
Administrator Don Miguel de Grifo announced today that the Erís transatlantic vehicle program was in fine shape, but that some revisions would have to be made. It is now apparent that the galley design selected, although effective in its original role in Mediterranean warfare, would be too small to carry the needed supplies for crew and galley slaves for a full transatlantic voyage to China. Therefore, the shipyard workers would be instructed to cut the hull in half and insert a new, lengthy section equal to a fourth of the galley’s original weight. According to de Grifo, it was an easy modification and would not affect the ship’s seaworthiness. It would, however, delay the start of the program by several years, and increase the cost by several hundred million maravedis.
Barcelona, Aragon. August 1498.
The troubled transatlantic program of Ferdinand and Isabella has run into further problems as Administrator Don Miguel de Grifo announced that the agency would require more time and money to fix several minor technical issues that had arisen in the development of its China galley. Simulations have suggested that the galley, originally designed for Mediterranean seas, would be shaken to pieces by the heavier waves of the Atlantic. Also, the insertion of the extra hull section has altered the seaworthiness of the whole design, leading to fears that the craft would snap in half in heavy seas. “Nothing a little more time and money would not cure,” said de Grifo.
Toledo, March 1500.
The Spanish court was today shaken by news arriving from Lisbon that a Portuguese navigator had accidentally discovered a vast new land in the Western ocean, when his ship had made an unexpectedly wide turn in rounding the horn of Africa. The land, which he dubbed “Brazil” after the island of mythology, appeared to be a new continent. Additionally, word arriving from Rome suggested that the Pope was about to issue a bull declaring this new continent exclusive property of Portugal, and off limits to other nations without a license from the Portuguese king.
Toledo. April 1500.
Today Their Majesties formally terminated their transatlantic program, which was now pointless in the wake of the Pope’s monopoly on Atlantic voyaging. The galley under construction in Barcelona is to be broken up for firewood, as it was in any case unlikely to be seaworthy for any purpose.
[Attribution to Jim Bennett
The Wrong Lessons From Apollo
It’s not news to anyone who has been reading him (and me, among others) for years, but Henry Spencer explains once again why NASA’s architecture choice is the wrong one (and no, I’m not talking about Ares):
There is also a longer-term advantage: if you decide to launch everything on one big rocket, what happens when you outgrow that rocket? Even if your early expeditions stay within the rocket’s capacity, presumably you’ll want to do bigger and more complex ones later. What then? Develop a still-larger rocket?
Even people who don’t want to depend on orbital assembly for the first expeditions to the Moon (or Mars, or wherever) often will concede that it will be necessary eventually. But then, where’s the gain in delaying it?
If you’re going to want to do orbital assembly anyway, you’re better off starting it right away, so even early expeditions can benefit from it. The only reason to delay it is if you think there won’t be any later expeditions – if you’re planning a dead-end programme.
I’ve never seen anyone even attempt to refute this logic.
[Update on Tuesday afternoon]
Well, here’s an attempt, but it uses ludicrous analogies:
One can only imagine someone talking to Prince Henry the Navigator circi 1410 and trying to convince him that adapting steam power (then known since Heron of Alexandria) to ships would be desirable to why not start now and stop messing with those quaint, wind powered caravels. Or someone else trying to sell jet engines to Lindbergh before crossing the Atlantic. Forever delaying doing things until the technology is “just right” doesn’t work very well.
No one is proposing the equivalent of steam power in the fifteenth century or jets in the nineteen twenties (though in the latter case, they weren’t far off). That would be akin to demanding a space elevator, or anti-matter rockets.
Nor is anyone, including me or Henry, proposing “forever delaying doing things until the technology is ‘just right.'” The technology for propellant depots could have been well in hand years ago had NASA stayed in the technology business, instead of cutting off all funding to it to redo what was done forty years ago. An assembly-based architecture could still easily be in place just as fast as NASA’s Constellation plans, and much cheaper, particularly given appropriate incentives to private industry. We are proposing that NASA plan for the future, with an affordable and sustainable plan, instead of looking to the past.
[Bumped]
[Mid-afternoon update]
It strikes me that this paragraph from my extended version of The Path Not Taken is relevant:
While the report of the Aldridge Commission on the new vision, released in June, had some good recommendations in it, it also had a few potentially disastrous ones. Perhaps the most damaging statement in it was to declare heavy-lift launch systems to be an “enabling technology” for carrying out the vision. This is a phrase of art in the engineering world meaning that, absent such a technology, the goal is unachievable. The commission is claiming that we cannot send humans beyond low earth orbit without a much larger launch vehicle than anything existing. If they had used the phrase “enhancing technology,” meaning that it’s not an absolute necessity, but that it makes things easier to do, I’d have less complaint, but as they’ve stated it, it commits us to an expensive development of a new launch system, that shows no promise of actually reducing costs. Moreover, it commits us to an approach to exploration that, like Apollo, is not affordable or sustainable.
I hope that this is a recommendation that can be revisited.
The Director’s Cut
When I wrote The Path Not Taken, over four years ago, for The New Atlantis, the original draft had to be cut to meet page-count requirements on the dead-tree edition (and it was also edited somewhat for style and content). I’ve decided to put the original, unedited draft on line for those interested, because it made some points that ended up on the cutting-room floor in the published piece, particularly regarding vehicle reliability.
It’s an even longer read now than the published one, but enjoy. Or not.