NASASpaceFlight has technical details of yesterday’s briefing. It still looks nuts to me.
Category Archives: Space
A Milestone For New Space
XCOR has attracted the funding of an institutional investor. It’s not just angels any more.
Tehran Failure
Jim Oberg has the story on Iran’s failed attempt to launch a satellite.
Our Screwed-Up Space Policy
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think it should always have been a no brainer.
The first rule of wing walking is to not let go of the airplane with one hand until you have a firm new grip with the other. It’s pretty simple: don’t shut down the Shuttle until you have a replacement in place (and preferably redundantly).
The only reason we’re undertaking such a dumb policy is because of the panic after the loss of Columbia causing a desire to end the program ASAP, and an unwillingness to pay what it cost to fund the new development at the same time we were continuing to spend billions annually on keeping the Shuttle going. The notion that we can take the savings from ending the Shuttle to develop the new systems seems appealing, but it essentially guarantees a “gap.”
And it’s all a result of the fact that space isn’t important. Is there any other government activity where we arbitrarily assign a budget number to it, and then demand that its endeavors fit within that budget? But that’s the way Congress has always viewed NASA–that there’s a certain level of spending that’s politically acceptable, and no more. If space were important, we’d do what we did in Apollo–establish a goal, and then provide the funding necessary to achieve it. But it’s not, other than for pork and prestige. It’s important that we have a space program, but it’s not at all important that it accomplish anything of value. Until that attitude changes, we’re unlikely to get sensible policy.
Shake, Rattle and Roll
Keith Cowing has a report on today’s telecon to discuss the Ares 1 vibration issue. Apparently they’ve settled on a solution before they really understand the problem.
[Late afternoon update]
Bobby Block and Todd Halvorson have blog posts up as well. But I think that Halvorson’s reporting is a little garbled here:
Gravitation forces on the astronauts will be reduced to 0.25 Gs from around 5 to 6 Gs, the latter of which is about double the force exerted on shuttle crews.
I think that he’s confusing the steady-state acceleration resulting from thrust with the vibration acceleration ostensibly being mitigated by the springs and dampers. Also, it’s not a “gravitation force.” I’m assuming that NASA meant that they can reduce the oscillations on the crew couch from high gees to a quarter of a gee, but that’s independent of the gees imposed by thrust. If they’re only accelerating at a quarter of a gee, that would result in horrific gravity losses during ascent.
McCain’s Space Advice
Well, now we know what the “space experts” told John McCain yesterday up in Titusville.
As I noted in my piece at PJM, the options aren’t very pretty. The lowest risk course is to continue Shuttle past 2010, but to keep this option open, they have to take some immediate actions to keep production open on consumables, such as ETs. As I’ve noted before, it’s ironic that they’re shutting the system down just as they’ve finally wrung most of the bugs out of it. It still remains horrifically expensive, of course, but no more so than Ares/Orion, and it has a lot more capability. I think that the “recertification” issue is a red herring. Just because the CAIB recommended it doesn’t mean that it makes any sense, since no one knows what it really means. Nothing magical happens in 2010 that makes it suddenly unsafe to fly. That date was chosen as the earliest one that they could retire and still complete ISS, not on the basis that anything was worn or wearing out. They could just continue to fly, and do periodic inspections.
I found it interesting, but not surprising, that Lafitte recommended an acceleration of Ares. It would be more in his company’s interest to just give up on it and use Atlas, but I suspect that would be too politically incorrect to say with reporters around. He has to live with Mike Griffin for at least another few months.
What would I do if I were king? I’d stop buying Soyuz, and keep the Shuttle flying, I’d abandon Ares/Orion, and provide huge incentives to the private sector by establishing prop depots and paying good money for prop delivery. That would require more money than people want to spend, but we’d get a lot more robust transportation infrastructure, ready to go to either the moon or Mars (or other destinations) at a lot lower mission cost than NASA’s current plans. It’s what we would do if space were really important. But of course, it’s not, so we won’t.
McCain’s Space Response?
I’d like to know who those “twenty hand-picked space experts” are. Unfortunately, I’ll bet that one of them is Walt Cunningham. But at least he won’t be the only one.
Casualty Of War?
I have a piece up at Pajamas Media this morning on the potential effect of Russia’s renewed belligerence on the US space program.
I should note that I may have been a little too sanguine about the situation for the current ISS crew. While the RSA astronauts in Expedition 17 weren’t born in Russia, it’s possible that they are Russians, and sympathetic to Russia, given the way that Russia had colonized the Ukraine and Turkmen Republic and moved populations of Russians in there. It’s all really speculation. Only the crew really know what the atmosphere is up there.
Scaled Brings in SpaceDev Again
SpaceDev has announced Scaled Composites has selected them to develop a hybrid motor for SpaceShipTwo in a $15 million contract. The point that SpaceDev was selected (not down-selected) in SpaceShipOne development was 3.25 years before winning the Ansari X-Prize. This is consistent with the duration announced for the development contract for SpaceShipTwo’s rocket motor of “through 2012” with work “primarily completed over the next two years”. SpaceShipTwo will likely burn rubber getting to suborbital space.
Change!
…and hope!
Well, not really. The Obama campaign has released its new space policy, and there’s not much breaking with the status quo in it. It’s basically sticking with the current plan, at least in civil space, but promising (as in all areas) to spend more money. While one suspects that Lori Garver must have played a major role in it, it also reads as though it was written by a committee, or different people wrote different sections, and then it was stitched together, like Frankenstein’s monster.
For instance, in one section, it says:
Obama will stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate spaceflight capabilities. NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services is a good model of government/industry collaboration.
But later on, in a different section, it says:
Obama will evaluate whether the private sector can safely and effectively fulfill some of NASA’s need for lower earth orbit cargo transport.
If COTS is a “good model,” why is such an “evaluation” necessary? Isn’t it already a given? I also like the notion that Obama himself would do the “evaluation.” As if.
It’s got the usual kumbaya about international cooperation, of course, which I think has been disastrous on the ISS. There are also implied digs at the Bush administration, about not “politicizing” science (as though Jim Hansen hasn’t done that himself) and opposing “weapons” in space. It also discusses more cooperation between NASA and NRO, ignoring the recent rumblings about getting rid of the latter, and the problems with security that would arise in such “cooperation.”
Also, interestingly, after Senator Obama called McCain’s proposed automotive prize a “gimmick,” the new policy now explicitly supports them. So are they no longer “gimmicks”? Or is it just that McCain’s idea was (for some unexplained reasons) but Obama’s are not?
Overall, my biggest concerns with it are more on the defense side than on the civil space side. This is utopian:
Barack Obama opposes the stationing of weapons in space and the development of anti-satellite weapons. He believes the United States must show leadership by engaging other nations in discussions of how best to stop the slow slide towards a new battlefield.
Sorry, but that horse is out of the barn, and there’s no way to get it back in. No anti-satellite weapons treaty would be verifiable. It is good to note, though, that the policy recognizes ORS as a means to mitigate the problem. That’s the real solution, not agreements and paper.
In any event, it’s a big improvement over his previous space policy, which was not a policy at all, but rather an adjunct to his education policy. Now it’s time for the McCain campaign to come up with one. I hope that he gets Newt to help him with it, and not Walt Cunningham.
[Mid-morning update]
One of the commenters over at NASA Watch picks up on something that I had missed:
Sen. Obama names COTS and several other programs by name, but not Ares or Constellation. He mentions “the Shuttle’s successor systems” without specifying what they might be.
That does give him some options for real change. I also agree that a revival of the space council would be a good idea. I hope that the McCain campaign doesn’t oppose this purely because the Obama campaign has picked it up.
[Afternoon update]
One other problem. While it talks about COTS, it has no mention of CATS (or CRATS, or CARATS, or whatever acronym they’re using this week for cheap and reliable access to space). It hints at it with COTS and ORS, but it’s not set out as an explicit goal. I hope that McCain’s policy does.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bobby Block has a report at the Orlando Sentinel space blog.
This part struck me (and didn’t surprise me):
Lori Garver, an Obama policy adviser, said last week during a space debate in Colorado that Obama and his staff first thought that the push to go to the moon was “a Bush program and didn’t make a lot of sense.” But after hearing from people in both the space and education communities, “they recognized the importance of space.” Now, she said, Obama truly supports space exploration as an issue and not just as a tool to win votes in Florida.
I’m not sure that Lori helped the campaign here. What does that tell us about the quality and cynicism of policy making in the Obama camp? They opposed it before they were for it because it was George Bush’s idea? And does that mean that space policy was just about votes in Florida before this new policy? I know that there are a lot of BDS sufferers who oppose VSE for this reason, and this reason alone, but it’s a little disturbing that such (non)thinking was actually driving policy in a major presidential campaign.
George Bush greatly expanded federal involvement in education and expanded Medicare. Are they going to shrink them accordingly? I’d like to think so, but I suspect not.