Category Archives: Space

Space

Patience

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Several years ago (more than I care to think about) we put up a new trellis, and planted a bougainvillea at the entrance to our back yard in southern California. The hope was that the plant would grow to fill in the trellis, providing a beautiful hedge for privacy. Though one of the features of an established bougainvillea is low watering needs, we at first watered it diligently to establish the roots and spur its growth. But it grew slowly, sending out a few tendrils that I attached strategically around the trellis in the hope that it would fill in smoothly and quickly. It took two or three years before it finally blocked the view through the fencing. Now, over a decade later, it grows so vigorously that it has to be trimmed regularly, lest it project thorny branches out into the path where people walk. Despite its slow start, it has a thick trunk, and massive root system, that provides structure and nourishment for now-rapid and unstoppable growth.

It’s a truism in technological progress that we are always overoptimistic in the short term. The corollary is that we tend to be pessimistic in the longer term. Both of these effects are a result of the fact that we tend to think linearly, while life, and growth happen more exponentially–very slow at first, and then growing explosively as they climb the curve.

So Jon and Clark shouldn’t be discouraged at the frustratingly slow progress so far in suborbital activities, and Clark should and will (barring some miracle out of Armadillo or someone this summer) buy Dwayne Day his Italian dinner with cheer and good grace, and make another bet. It’s tragic, of course, that some of those on Jon’s list will not live to see the fruit of their labors, who might have had we been able to make better progress. But we can’t let that discourage us.

We have just finally, after delays caused much more by false perceptions than technological ability, gotten the plants in the ground, and the irrigation is on them, in the form of ongoing funding. Of course, they’re experimental hybrid plants, so it’s hard to know their growth rate ahead of time, or which of them will survive the soil or sun of their location. But over time, some will succeed, and grow, slowly at first, but eventually faster, until they are thriving at such a rate that we will marvel at all the people who said that the soil was barren, and that they would never flower, let alone fruit. And we will marvel from far above them, from the top of our garden that reaches up into the sky, and beyond.

General, Space

Memorial Service Arrangements

Note: I’ve bumped this post to the top, with an update. It will stay at the top for a couple days, so if you see it first, continue reading past–I’ll still be posting new stuff.

For any of my Huntsville area readers who wish to pay their respects to Darren Spurlock, David Alan Smith of Boeing passes on the following information:

Kelly and her family is planning for a service this Tuesday and Wednesday as shown below:

Tuesday, June 3
Berryhill Funeral Home
2035 Memorial Parkway North
Huntsville, AL
Visitation: 12:00 p.m.
Funeral: 2:00 p.m.

Wednesday, June 4
Hermitage Memorial Gardens
535 Shute Lane
Old Hickory, TN
Graveside service and burial: 11:00 a.m.

We talked further about those who knew him sharing some remembrances at his service. She and her ministers are very happy to have us do that. Since we don’t have much time I offer the following approach. If you will be able to physically attend and want to say something, please tell me and give me an idea of how long you need. If you have something you would like to share at his service but can not come, I will be glad to act as your surrogate. If you have something you would just like Kelly, Ben (6) and James (3) to have I will compile them electronically. I need those items you would like shared Tuesday by COB Monday. As these boys grow older, it will help them know Darren as the man he was.

Kelly’s public notice on Darren’s death will include the following:

In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the Mayfair Church of Christ:

1095 Carl T. Jones Dr.
Huntsville, AL 35802

However, she very much appreciated our thought to honor Darren through supporting Ben and James education. So as a “work” friend, if you feel moved you can send her a check in her name with the reference to the “Darren Spurlock Education Fund”. She can deposit these in Ben and James college savings accounts.

Kelly Spurlock

[Address deleted because I don’t want to blast her home address on the Interweb, the world being the sad place that it is these days in that regard. Anyone interested can contact me at the email address in the upper left corner of the blog, and I’ll relay it. Actually, I’d suggest that Kelly establish a trust with a PO Box, and a web page to take donations via Paypal–perhaps someone else can help her with this. –rs]

And finally, I can not stress how much a card, note and/or remembrance means to her. Darren touched many lives. Let us show that as a monument to his life with us. Your support, thoughts and prayers for Kelly and the boys are very much appreciated.

David Alan Smith
Advanced Programs, Exploration Launch Systems
Space Exploration, The Boeing Company

If anyone wants to get hold of David and doesn’t have his contact info (which again, I didn’t want to display), again, email me.

[Update, per my comment about not wanting to post Kelly’s home address]

For those of all called to honor Darren’s memory in a way that will positively affect his family’s future, we have established the “Darren Spurlock Memorial Education Fund” for his two boys Ben and James via 529 college savings accounts. To contribute to this account you may:

Make check payable to: College America.

In memo field: Spurlock Education Fund.

Mail to:

First Financial Group
400 Meridian Street, Ste.100
Huntsville, AL 35801

Any contribution you send will divided equally into an account for Ben and account for James. And thank you for honoring a beloved colleague and friend.

Space, Space History

Losing A Champion

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I didn’t see Len Cormier at Space Access in March, though he has rarely missed one in the past. Now via an email from Pat Kelley, I learned why:

I’m sad to announce that Len Cormier is losing his battle with cancer. I spoke with him today, and he’s in a hospice awaiting the end. I’ve had the privilege of his friendship and professional partnership for over ten years, and I hate to see this come to an end before my goal of at least giving him the satisfaction of seeing a project birthed from his incredible intellect at least get started.

Len is not terribly religious, but I know he would not be offended by good wishes, prayers, or whatever means you may choose to honor him. I will miss him.

I don’t know how far from the end it is, and where there’s life there’s hope, so I won’t talk about him in the past tense. But if he doesn’t make it, it will be a damned shame. No one living has been talking about affordable access to space, and worked as hard at it as Len, having been an advocate for almost half a century. He was also one of the gentlest men, in the gentleman sense, that I’ve ever met, always gracious, even in the face of unreasonable criticism and often vituperation.

It’s a tragedy that he is leaving us just as the funding dam is starting to break on the kinds of projects that he has been advocating for so long, and that he won’t see the results. He should go knowing, though, that he played a significant role in laying the ground work for it, and inspired many who will carry on in his stead. Despite his failure to achieve his audacious goals, I think that he’ll be far more than a footnote in the history of astronautics.

[Update a few minutes later]

Another email comment from Rick Jurmain:

Len’s a man with dreams too grand for a single lifetime. That’s as it should be.

Or, to paraphrase Sunset Boulevard: He is big. It’s the space program that got small.

It’s been an honor to work with Len. I’ll remember him.

History, Space

One Man, One Way

7 Comments

Phil Bowermaster has some thoughts on what I think is actually quite a likely scenario for the first human on Mars. It won’t be done by NASA, though, or likely any government space agency. They simply can’t afford to take the risk when it’s funded by taxpayers, as we’ve seen when the nation gets unreasonably hysterical over astronaut deaths. It will be a privately funded expedition, which will be able to do so without the intrusion of politics.

And of course, this will be more in the nature of such exploration. After all, the vast majority of polar exploration (e.g., Peary, Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton) was privately funded. Once we get the cost of access to orbit down, and establish an orbital fueling infrastructure, it will be quite feasible to raise the money for private adventures such as this.

Sadly, NASA is contributing almost nothing to those goals, instead spending billions developing expensive government-owned/operated launch vehicles and capsules that will likely become obsolete before they first fly.

Space

Beautiful Launch

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We’d considered driving up, but I read at the Flame Trench that it was the biggest crowd since return to flight (probably because it was a beautiful day, and a Saturday), and we didn’t want to fight the throngs and sit in the car all day. I’ve never been able to see a launch from here in Boca–maybe it’s too low on the horizon with all the obstructions (the fact that they launch northerly probably doesn’t help), so we watched on television. Looked flawless to me, other than a couple specks flying back along the tank.

I think that if they don’t have any more problems for a while, there will be a lot of pressure to close the “gap” by extending the program, now that it looks like NASA has wrung the bugs out of it. Particularly given what a mess Ares/Orion seems to be.

General, Space

Senseless

4 Comments

I just got some bad news. When I saw this story at NASA Watch, I recognized the name, but hoped that it wasn’t the Darren Spurlock with whom I’d worked three years ago on the CE&R studies for NASA, back before Griffin came in and decided to implement his own ESAS architecture. That Darren was at least a decade younger than fifty, and he worked at Boeing. But it seemed unlikely to me that there would be two aerospace engineers in Huntsville with that name.

Sadly (though of course it would be tragedy regardless of which Darren Spurlock died) I just got off the phone with one of his Boeing former colleagues. The paper got the age wrong, and he had left Boeing to work for Marshall only three weeks ago. I never met his wife, but want to extend my condolences to her. I believe he left a young family. I’ll be getting info about memorial services, and post them when I get them, for those interested in the Huntsville area.

I didn’t know Darren that long–the CE&R study was my only work with him, but he was a good man, a good, smart hard-working engineer, and he worked very hard to come up with and document architectures that would be affordable and sustainable in getting us off the planet, in consonance with the president’s Vision for Space Exploration. He was as frustrated as anyone when NASA basically ignored everything we’d done under Steidle to come up with the current…plan. But he moved on, obviously, and must have been looking forward to doing good things at the agency itself. Now, senselessly, a valuable career and valuable life have been cut short.

[Evening update]

This post now comes up numero uno in a search for “Darren Spurlock.

Who knoweth the ways of Google?

Political Commentary, Space

Externships

8 Comments

Jon Goff has some thoughts about outsourcing NASA employees to private industry.

It’s an interesting concept, and not to discourage him from out-of-the-box thinking, but it has several flaws, more than one of which is almost certainly fatal.

Where would they work? Senator Shelby is not going to countenance a program that ships a Huntsville employee off to Mojave (and there are a lot of NASA employees who don’t want to move to Mojave). It’s not just the jobs that are important, but where they are. So it may necessitate moving the company to places like Huntsville to take advantage of it, even though it may be a terrible location from most other standpoints (e.g., flight test). In addition, a lot of the jobs that Congress wants to save aren’t just NASA civil servants–more, probably many more of them are contractors. How does that work? Does Boeing send you an extern and get reimbursed by NASA? How do you work out proprietary issues (among others)? How do you ensure that they send you the best employees, and not the ones they were going to lay off?

Also, there will be a huge discontinuity with skill matches. The current Shuttle work force, for the most part, knows very little about vehicle development, and what they know about vehicle operations, from the standpoint of a low-cost launch provider, is mostly wrong. Also, while a lot of people work for NASA because they’re excited about space, many there do so because they like the civil service protections and pensions. They don’t necessarily want to work the long hours often demanded of a startup, and they come from an employment culture that may be quite incompatible with the fixed-price private sector. I won’t say any more than that, but this is one of the reasons that the Aldridge Commission’s recommendation to convert the NASA centers to FFRDCs went over like a lead blimp.

And how would one qualify to get these “government resources” and how many would you get? As many as you ask for? After all, if the product is free (and contra the paragraph above, desirable) surely demand will exceed supply. How will you allocate the supply. It won’t happen on price, obviously, so some other solution will have to be developed. Would a company “bid” for an extern (and would they be able to bid on a specific person, or would they have to take pot luck?) by putting some kind of proposal to demonstrate how worthy their cause and their use of her will be? Who will be the equivalent of a source selection board for such a process? Can the current acquisition regulations even accommodate something like this? I know that this currently occurs for a few individuals, where it is mutually agreed, but I’m not sure that it would work for an entire work force.

Just a few thoughts, off the top of my head.