AP is reporting that the Pentagon is planning to “shoot down” the errant NRO bird.

You can’t “shoot down” a satellite. In order to do so, you have to remove its momentum, so it falls out of orbit. All you can really do (at least with something as crude as a missile) is break it up into smaller pieces. If that’s what they plan to do, they certainly can.

Won’t it make a mess? Yes, for a while. Some of the pieces will enter immediately, others will be given a higher apogee (but lower perigee, so they’ll enter half an orbit later). The orbits of those that aren’t given much of an energy change will continue to decay as the satellite’s original orbit was, except at a higher rate, because they’ll have a lower mass/drag ratio. So in theory, if they do this, all of the pieces will have entered within a month or so (i.e., none of them will survive longer than the satellite itself is expected to).

This just points up the fact, once again, how nice it would be to actually have a robust in-space infrastructure of tugs and servicing facilities that would allow us to take care of things like this in a more elegant fashion. In fact, it would allow us to even go get the thing and put it in the right orbit, so we wouldn’t have to dispose of it, and replace it. Unfortunately, it’s not a capability that either NASA or the Air Force evidence any interest in developing.

[Late afternoon update]

Daniel Fischer is live blogging the Pentagon briefing on NASA TV, here and here.

A post that I just put up today is now in the top ten (number eight, right now) of a Google search for “Mike Griffin NASA.” And I didn’t even get an Instalink on it.

Who’s got it right, the Mike Griffin of today, or the Mike Griffin of five years ago?

In the 1950s and 1960s, the term “man rating” was coined to describe the process of converting the military Redstone, Atlas, and Titan II vehicles to the requirements of manned spaceflight. This involved a number of factors such as pogo suppression, structural stiffening, and other details not particularly germane to today’s expendable vehicles. The concept of “man rating” in this sense is, I believe, no longer very relevant.

Does he still agree with this congressional testimony?

Now to be fair, he may not be saying that Atlas isn’t safe enough–he expresses interest in using it for COTS. The problem, as Jon Goff points out at the Space Politics thread, is that he’s chosen an architecture that replicates Apollo, which requires a large CM and SM on a single launch. If one is willing to break these up into separate launches, an EELV can handle it easily. But instead of spending his budget getting flight rate up and launch costs down, and doing the R&D necessary to learn how to truly become spacefaring (e.g., space assembly, docking/mating, propellant storage and transfer), he wants to relive the days of von Braun.

Looks like there were no tile problems yesterday, and the ECO sensors performed as advertised.

It’s kind of ironic that they seem to have finally wrung some of the last bugs out of the system just before they’re going to retire it.

You know, given what a technical and economic disaster ESAS is turning out to be, I could be persuaded to extend Shuttle past 2010 at this point, and just wait for the private sector to take over its duties, particularly if the money would go toward a propellant depot and the development of lunar injection and landing hardware. I don’t know what it would take to resurrect the contracts and production lines that have been shut down, though.

There’s an interesting article over at the New Scientist (via Clark Lindsey, and including a quote by Jon Goff) on human rating the Atlas for Bob Bigelow.

One comment I have:

One requirement is to make the rocket more robust against failures. The goal is to have enough redundancies that the rocket could survive two simultaneous failures of any of its parts. Another is to have an emergency detection system that could sense problems and abort a launch when required.

The second requirement is the most critical, and is what really lies at the heart of human rating (a subject that I have ranted about occasionally).

If the vehicle doesn’t currently have enough redundancy to be reliable, then the satellite insurance companies should be asking Lockheed Martin why it doesn’t–their clients’ satellites aren’t cheap, and they expect, for the price they’re paying, them to end up in orbit and not at the bottom of the Atlantic. No, I think that the real issue is FOSD (Failure On-Set Detection), which doesn’t currently exist on the EELVs other than for range-safety destruct purposes. Fortunately, the failure modes of a liquid-engined vehicle like the Atlas tend to be fairly benign, at least for propulsion, with ample warning if the right sensors are in place (much more so, in fact, than for the SRB which, while it has never had any in-flight failures, if it does, they’re more likely to be unexpected and sudden).

Anyway, let’s talk about The Gap, the one that Babs Mikulski and Kay Bailey Hutchison think is so critical to “national security” (at least Senator Hutchison, though she never explains exactly how) that NASA must get an extra couple billion dollars to close it.

What gap is that? The only gap will be that of NASA’s inability to put up astronauts on their own new launch vehicle, based on a flawed concept, that’s turning out to not be “safe,” “simple,” or “soon,” as originally advertised. As far as I can tell, as Bigelow and Lockheed Martin’s plans continue to move forward, either with a Dragon or Dreamchaser, (and possibly with the use of a Falcon 9, should Elon finally get it flying) there will be no gap. Americans will be able to fly into space, and probably even to the ISS (unless NASA refuses to certify the vehicles as meeting their Visiting Vehicle Requirements, which are similar to “human rating” as a means for NASA to arbitrarily exclude anyone it wants from its playground). They just won’t do it on Ares or with Orion. So there will be no “gap.”

And of course, I speculated at the time of the announcement that this has to be really pissing off supporters of Ares, Orion and the ESAS within NASA. It was confirmed to me a month or so later by someone fairly high in the Atlas program that this was indeed the case, and that there was even unhappiness within Lockmart about it, but that Orion and Atlas (and ULA) are two different organizations, and the latter has to find customers. This unhappiness came out publicly the other day, when Mike Griffin blamed Lockheed Martin for the recent criticism of his pet launcher.

It couldn’t possibly be any technical deficiencies of the concept, no, it’s just parochial carping by evil capitalists. As I replied to Mark Whittington in comments over at Space Politics, John Logsdon’s comment that the criticism was about “ego and profits” is laughable, as though Mike Griffin and NASA officials have no egos, and as though ATK and Boeing are building the vehicle pro bono, and not taking any of the taxpayers’ money.

In any event, it doesn’t really matter in the long run. Ares will stumble on as long as this administrator is in place, and in a year or so when the new president is replacing him and reviewing space policy in general, it’s likely that even further progress will have been made by Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, SpaceDev and Bigelow, and it will be increasingly clear that “The Gap” is an invention of people who simply want to be able to build NASA vehicles with the taxpayers’ funds, and it will probably be the end of ESAS, and the beginning of a more rational policy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Based on further related discussion at Space Politics, John Logsdon apparently didn’t even say what Mark claims he did. What a surprise.

[Early afternoon update]

Jon has more thoughts, as does Clark:

The fundamental problem is Griffin’s insistence on building new launchers to fit his exploration architecture rather than fitting an architecture to existing launchers (and to soon-to-be-existing ones like Falcon 9). Yes, a robust lunar program might require development of some new technology slightly beyond what’s currently on the shelf such as fuel depots and in-space refueling but that is what we should expect an R&D agency to do. The next time NASA astronauts go to the Moon, they should get there via a program that actually advances the state of the art of spaceflight rather than via a retro-architecture that “proves” to everyone yet again how impractical and unsustainable human spaceflight is.

Indeed. As I wrote over at Space Politics, to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, with a limited budget, you go to the moon with the launch vehicles you have, not the launch vehicles you’d like to have.

[Early afternoon update]

One other point over at the Space Politics thread:

Griffin also needs some serious legal counsel with regard to his comments to the press. The agency has past and current COTS competitions, not to mention launch service competitions for robotic missions, in which Atlas V has been a proposed launcher. Unless Griffin wants those awards challenged and decisions revisited yet again, he needs to avoid potentially biased statements in the public about specific industry vehicles.

Well, he’s an engineer, not a lawyer. Of course, it’s part of the intrinsic conflict of interest when you have a government agency competing with the private sector. It’s a hole that Mike has put himself into with his approach.

[Early evening update]

For anyone late to this particular party (though with surprisingly few comments), I have a follow-up post.

Apparently CalOSHA has issued their report, and it remains unclear what caused the explosion at Scaled last summer. Charles Lurio notes (as I’ve been saying for, well, forever, or at least since I heard about the proposal to go with a nitrous hybrid):

…largely because of its ability to self-detonate – nitrous oxide has every now and then created unhappy surprises whose causes are difficult or impossible to explain. This may turn out to have been the case at Mojave. If in the end no cause for that incident is identifiable, Scaled should perhaps consider an alternative oxidizer for its hybrid; liquid oxygen (LOX) may be less convenient to transport and manage but doesn’t have nitrous’ particular unpredictabilities.

It also performs much better, whether with hybrids or liquids. This is very bad news. If you don’t know what caused an accident, it’s very difficult to know how to prevent it from recurring. Even if it causes a delay in the schedule, I think that they will have to go to some other design, and I also think (as I’ve always thought) that they should subcontract it out to an established propulsion house, such as HMX or XCOR, who are right there on the field.

Maybe when Burt has recovered from his recent health problems, he’ll be in better shape to grasp that nettle than he has been.

The launch seemed to go fine. We looked for it from the house, but I’ve given up on seeing it from here. I think that the roof line is just too high above the trajectory, when it’s heading north up to the ISS. The only launch I’ve seen from here was an Atlas at night, and it was heading due east, so it wasn’t moving away from us as fast. It reminds me, though, that there aren’t going to be very many more opportunities to see it. I suspect that it’s the largest launch vehicle that we’re going to have for a long, long time.