Starts in forty minutes or so. This is sort of like the Apollo days, when the news networks would go live to the spacecraft. There’s a lot more to see at ISS.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Certification Versus Licensing Of Space Vehicles
A new journal paper on the subject. One of the authors is the head of FAA-AST. I haven’t read it yet.
Note that this is a different discussion than whether or not AST should be regulating passenger safety. It’s a discussion of how to regulate, not what to regulate.
Defending Earth From Asteroids
My former colleague from the Aerospace Corporation, Bill Ailor, gave a FISO presentation the other day. Clark Lindsey has the story.
The NASA Budget
It’s killed off the only hope of the agency getting beyond low earth orbit, at least for now.
Arguably, there is no greater enabling technology to be achieved with less overall investment than cryogenic propellant storage and transfer. While we currently have the ability to conduct long term deep space missions using storable hypergolic propellants, their relatively low performance is a critical limiting factor in both robotic and crewed space missions. Developing and demonstrating the ability store high performance cryogenic propellants in space for long periods of time without significant boil-off is nothing less than a necessity for long term exploration. Taken together with the closely related challenge of transferring cryogenic propellants from one container to another in zero-g, as well as accurately measuring the amount of fluid in a storage vessel, the net result is leveraging effect with stunning capacity. In fact, as the Augustine commission determined,
“In the absence of in-space refueling, the U.S. human spaceflight program will require a heavy-lift launcher of significantly greater than 25 mt capability to launch the EDS and its fuel. However the picture changes significantly if in-space refueling is used.” Furthermore “Studies commissioned by the Committee found that in-space refueling could increase by at least two to three times the injection capability from low-Earth orbit of a launcher system, and in some cases more. Thus, an in-space refueling capability would make larger super-heavy lift vehicles even more capable, and would enable smaller ones to inject from low-Earth orbit a mass comparable to what larger launchers can do without in space refueling.”
For a nation and an agency serious about exploring space, it is difficult to think of a single justifiable reason why proceeding with an orbital demonstration of this enabling technology should not be a priority. It is very easy to come up with an unjustifiable reason however. It represents a viable alternative to SLS.
Yes.
Gonorrhea
…is on the verge of being untreatable.
Wonderful.
Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Historical Knowledge
No, not about Bruno, but about the history of exploration:
There is no nice, clean line between private “buck making” and high-minded government exploration just for the sake of it. From the Wright Brothers making the key advances in aviation to IBM funded Nobel Prize winning basic research, innumerable breakthroughs in science and technology have been led by private non-governmental ventures.
Yes. It’s the post-war government funding that’s been an anomaly, historically. Fortunately, when it comes to spaceflight, that era is ending.
SpaceX Mission Reliability
General Shelton says they’re not ready for prime time:
Launches of NASA cargo to the International Space Station, including one planned early Sunday, don’t guarantee SpaceX is ready to launch military satellites, the head of Air Force Space Command said Tuesday in Cape Canaveral.
If a rocket failed, the loss of a national security satellite potentially worth more than $1.5 billion would be a bigger setback than losing food, clothing and other station supplies, Gen. William Shelton told the National Space Club Florida Committee.
“So there’s a big difference,” he said.
This is one reason that talk about “human rating” an Atlas (or Delta) is silly. If it’s reliable enough for a $1.5B satellite, it’s reliable enough to carry crew. All it ever needed was failure onset detection. And when SpaceX starts flying crew, the general’s argument will be much less strong.
Cheap Desalination
…through graphene oxide?
This would be a game changer.
OK, looks like someone broke it.
The Malaysian Air Flight
How can an airplane just disappear?
Some people think that with satellites we have an “every sparrow that falls” omniscience, but we’re not there yet.