Dennis Wingo remembers Ernst Stuhlinger.
Category Archives: Space
Saganites?
I find it amusing that these folks were clueless as to the purpose of the Google Lunar Prize when they signed up:
In my first blog, I wrote why Harold Rosen formed the Southern California Selene Group. In short, he and I registered our team to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE to demonstrate that a low-cost space mission to the moon could be accomplished and could lead to lowering the cost of some future robotic missions to planetary moons. Plus, we intended to have fun! Harold and I both are strong supporters of space science and robotic space exploration. (For one, I’m an astronomy and cosmology enthusiast.) We love the kind of work that JPL is doing, for example. But we most definitely are not in favor of human space missions. That is not our goal, nor do we support such a goal.
The Team Summit turned out to be a real wakeup call. In the Guidelines workshop that I attended just last Tuesday, the cumulative effect of hearing all day from Peter Diamandis, Bob Weiss and Gregg Maryniak that the “real purpose” of the Google Lunar X PRIZE was to promote the so-called commercialization of space (which I took to mean highly impractical stuff like mining the moon and beaming power to the earth, as shown in one of GLXP kickoff videos), humanity’s future in space, etc. etc., took its toll. I couldn’t help but think “what am I doing here?” When I spoke to Harold about it on the phone later, he agreed – no way did he want to be involved in promoting a goal he does not believe in.
So, what does this mean? It sounds to me like it’s not just a goal they “don’t believe in” (which is fine–they could not believe in it and still want to win the prize for their own purposes), but rather, a goal to which they are actively opposed, and don’t think that anyone should be pursuing. I’m very curious to hear them elaborate their views, but it sounds like they’re extreme Saganites. For those unfamiliar with the schools of thought, you have the von Braun model, in which vast government resources are expended to send a few government employees into space (this is Mike Griffin’s approach), the Sagan model (“such a beautiful universe…don’t touch it!), and the O’Neillian vision of humanity filling up the cosmos.
So when they say they don’t support such a goal, does that mean they oppose it, and would take action to prevent it from happening if they could? Sure sounds like it. And they take it as a given that lunar mining is “impractical,” but is that their only reason for opposing it, or do they think that it somehow violates the sanctity of the place, and disturbs what should be accessible only for pure and noble science? I’ll bet that they’d prefer a lot fewer humans on earth, too.
[Via Clark Lindsey]
[Update late morning]
Commenter “Robert” says that I’m being unfair to Carl Sagan. Perhaps he’s right–I was just using the formulation originally (I think) developed by Rick Tumlinson, though Sagan was definitely much more into the science and wonder of space than were von Braun or O’Neill… If anyone has a suggestion for a better representative of the “how pretty, don’t touch” attitude, I’m open to suggestions.
Space Tourism Heating Up In Europe
Apparently, things are starting to get more serious over there, though the EADS/Astrium concept remains a bad joke. Rob Coppinger has a roundup from across the pond.
Bizarro World
The comments (125 and counting) in this post over at Space Politics a few days ago have gotten progressively weirder and weirder.
Did you know that New Space is a baby boomer thing? And that it’s a failed paradigm, while the standard procedures of NASA giving out cost-plus government contracts has been a total success, and will get us to the stars any year now?
Me, neither. What is “Someone” smoking? No surprise that he or she posts anonymously.
Soyuz Question
Anyone out there know what they’re using for comm these days? Do they have a TDRSS system as part of the ISS operations agreement? Or something else? Or both?
[Update about 1 PM EDT]
Via an email from Jim Oberg:
Mir used to have a TDRSS-like system called ‘Luch’, and a dish antenna capable of communicating with the GEO relay satellite is installed on the Service Module now linked to ISS.
But it’s never worked. The old system broke down and wasn’t replaced in the 1990’s. There are one or two payloads already built, at the Reshetnev plant in Krasnoyarsk, but they won’t deliver them until the Russian Space Agency pays cash — and by now, their components have probably exceed their warranties anyway.
The Russians have a voice relay capability through the NASA TDRSS, but can’t relay TV or telemetry, so they conduct how-criticality operations such as dockings or spacewalks only when passing over Russian ground sites. They don’t even have ocean-going tracking ships any more — all sold for scrap [one is in drydock as a museum].
Lunar Property Rights
The current state of play, according to Glenn Reynolds. There was a piece on the subject in Sunday’s Boston Globe as well. I wish that Congress would do something about this. It would have a lot bigger effect in the long run than deciding how much to underfund a failed Constellation concept.
Crossing Their Fingers
It looks like NASA’s not going to abandon the ISS. That seems sensible to me.
I’d like to know where they get the 1/124 number for probability of having to evacuate. But it makes sense, given that they’re already down at least one (and actually, more like two or three) level in the fault tree, that you can accept a lower reliability for the lifeboat. Lifeboats, after all, have traditionally been pretty iffy propositions. It’s not reasonable to demand high reliability of them. That was one of the complaints that I used to have when working on CERV–that the requirements were overspecified for something that was only for use in an emergency.
On The Radio
I’ll be on The Space Show on Sunday afternoon at noon to 1:30 PM PDT, talking about space and politics, and whatever.
Lack Of Confidence
Wow.
NASA is actually considering abandoning ISS until they can resolve the safety issues surrounding the Soyuz currently docked there (and in general).
This whole fiasco reveals a fundamental design (in fact conceptual) flaw of the station from the beginning (one that was shared by the Shuttle)–a lack of redundancy and resiliency. NASA had the hubris to think that they could design and build a single vehicle type that could not only have the flexibility to satisfy all of the nation’s (and much of the world’s) needs for transport to and from space, but do so with confidence that it would never have cause to shut down (and remove our ability to access LEO). They learned the foolishness of this notion in 1986, with the Challenger loss.
Similarly, they decided to build a manned space station, that would be all things to all people–microgravity researchers, earth observations, transportation node, hotel–because they didn’t think that they could afford more than one, and so they have no resiliency in their orbital facilities, either. If something goes wrong with the station, everyone has to abandon it, with nowhere to go except back to earth.
Having multiple stations co-orbiting, with an in-space crew transport vehicle (which could serve as a true lifeboat) was never considered, though the cost wouldn’t necessarily have been that much higher had it been planned that way from the beginning (there would have been economies of scale by building multiple facilities from a single basic design). That would have been true orbital infrastructure.
Instead, we have a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) space station supported by a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) launch system, with only the Russian Soyuz as a backup. And because there is no place nearby to go, if there’s a problem on the station, everyone has to come home, and the crew size is thus limited by the size of the “lifeboat,” (which is a “lifeboat” only in the sense that it is relied on for life–in actuality, it’s much more than that. It’s as if the “lifeboats” of the Titanic had to be capable of delivering their passengers all the way to New York or Southampton).
And now we can’t trust the backup, and we have no lifeboat at all.
Now that the ISS is almost complete, it is capable of supporting the Shuttle orbiter on orbit for much longer periods of time by providing power, so its orbital lifetime is no longer constrained by fuel cell capacity. But it’s still not practical to leave an orbiter there full time, because a) with only three left, we don’t have a big enough fleet to do so without impacting turnaround time for the others and b) we’re not sure how long it’s capable of staying safely without (say) freezing tires or causing other problems, because the vehicle wasn’t designed for indefinite duration in space.
So as a result of flawed decisions made decades ago, NASA is in a real quandary. They can leave the crew up there, and cross their fingers that a) nothing goes wrong that requires an emergency return and b) that if the return is required, the Soyuz will work properly. Or they can abandon the station until they resolve the Soyuz issues (something over which they have absolutely no control, and will have to trust the Russians).
Sucks to be them.
[Update a few minutes later]
Not that it solves this immediate problem, but Flight Global has a conceptual rendering of a European crew transportation system (presumably based on the ATV) that could (in theory) be available within a decade.
[Another update]
Here’s more on ATV evolution, over at today’s issue of The Space Review.
[One more thought, at 11 AM EDT]
NASA doesn’t seem to have learned the lesson of Shuttle and ISS, because Constellation has exactly the same problem–a single vehicle type for each phase of the mission. If Altair is grounded, we can’t land on the moon. If the EDS has problems, we can’t get into a trans-lunar orbit. If something goes wrong with Orion, or Ares, the program is grounded. Why aren’t there Congressional hearings, or language in an authorization bill, about that?
Authorizing NASA
There’s a lot of good discussion (and some not-so-good discussion) of the NASA Authorization bill over at Space Politics, here, here and here. I haven’t read the whole thing, and frankly, it’s hard for me to get motivated to invest much time or thought in it, because it’s just an authorization bill. Most of the time, they never even get passed, and even when they do, they’re pretty meaningless, because the only one that really counts is the appropriations bill, where the money gets handed out. Authorization, when it exists at all, simply serves as a sense of the Congress (and more generally, just as a sense of the relevant Congressional committee). But to that degree, it does provide a useful insight into where appropriations might lead, and potential future policy, particularly in the next administration.