Craig Couvault reports that our fragile and unreliable launch infrastructure isn’t just important for commercial space activities. It may be affecting our ability to effectively prosecute the war.

Nearly a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Reconnaissance Office and National Security Agency lack two $1-billion secret eavesdropping spacecraft that should have been operational by now to provide critical intelligence to help track terrorist operations and plan for a possible war with Iraq.

The story also says that NRO may be responding as ineptly and ineffectively as the FBI and other government agencies. Former NRO engineer Dave Thompson rakes them over the coals. I’ve always been impressed by Dave, who remains a straight shooter, even if it puts his business in jeopardy (NRO is a primary customer of Spectrum Astro).

“NRO exhibits an astounding lack of revolutionary innovation to get Al Qaeda,” said David Thompson, president and CEO of Spectrum Astro, a company that has contracts with NRO and other military programs. “Over the past decade, the NRO has posted a sorry decline into mediocrity and aristocracy.” Before moving to the private sector, Thompson was an engineer at NRO.

He said NRO has not “done anything to make innovative new satellites to fight Al Qaeda.”

His remarks, little noticed at the time, were made four months ago at a Space Foundation dinner in Colorado Springs. If the changes delaying the payload will help it better monitor Al Qaeda or Iraq, it might help blunt some of Thompson’s criticism.

“The NRO has suffered a shocking decline in the technical performance of its satellites over the past several years,” he said. “They haven’t told you about that because it has been kept behind closed doors.

“Many NRO satellites never even got launched as they meandered their way through years of technical and program ‘management mismanagement,’ yet no one was held accountable. NRO is actually moving backward, getting less capability and fielding less capable technology for the future,” he noted.

Yup, I feel better now. At least we got that shiny new office building out in Reston, for all those unaccounted-for billions we’ve given to them.

A Brit, who disagrees with US policy, says that despite that, it’s dumb to call Americans dumb.

I’ve been remiss, and so busy lately, that I haven’t been keeping up with my favorite news source–the Weekly World News. I’ve particularly fallen behind on the heart-rending saga of Bat Boy.

But I was fascinated to learn today, in perusing the recent headlines, that the Confederacy was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, with the ostensible purpose of destroying Washington, DC, and thus bringing to a rapid conclusion the War of Northern Aggression.

I was particularly enlightened by these lines:

?Thaddeus McMullen was a plantation slave-owner who loathed Abraham Lincoln and was willing to do anything to ensure a Confederate victory.

?He was also a brilliant researcher and scientist — in league with Albert Einstein. This made for a horrifying combination that almost resulted in the fiery deaths of thousands of innocent people.?

And here, all this time, I thought that Al Einstein was born years after the end of the war.

It almost makes me question the veracity of the story. I’d hate to think that my favorite news publication would ever publish anything that isn’t true.

It’s hard to work up much more anger at Reuters, these days, but this might do it. It’s the caption to a picure of the WTC-less work site in downtown Manhattan. Note the scare quotes on “war on terror”:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as “ground zero” in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. “war on terror” since September 11.

Yes, right. That should always be the lead of any story about the horrendous attack on American soil almost a year ago. That human rights around the world are deteriorating as a result of our response to it.

You know, like the right to slash a flight attendant’s throat, and fly her airplane into the side of a skyscraper. Or the right to strap high explosives to your midriff and scatter Jewish baby parts all over with it. Our fundamental rights are under attack.

Let’s see if the blogosphere has any power. Maybe if we generate enough outrage, they’ll reconsider it, and change it.

[Thanks to “JMiller” via email]

It’s hard to work up much more anger at Reuters, these days, but this might do it. It’s the caption to a picure of the WTC-less work site in downtown Manhattan. Note the scare quotes on “war on terror”:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as “ground zero” in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. “war on terror” since September 11.

Yes, right. That should always be the lead of any story about the horrendous attack on American soil almost a year ago. That human rights around the world are deteriorating as a result of our response to it.

You know, like the right to slash a flight attendant’s throat, and fly her airplane into the side of a skyscraper. Or the right to strap high explosives to your midriff and scatter Jewish baby parts all over with it. Our fundamental rights are under attack.

Let’s see if the blogosphere has any power. Maybe if we generate enough outrage, they’ll reconsider it, and change it.

[Thanks to “JMiller” via email]

It’s hard to work up much more anger at Reuters, these days, but this might do it. It’s the caption to a picure of the WTC-less work site in downtown Manhattan. Note the scare quotes on “war on terror”:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as “ground zero” in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. “war on terror” since September 11.

Yes, right. That should always be the lead of any story about the horrendous attack on American soil almost a year ago. That human rights around the world are deteriorating as a result of our response to it.

You know, like the right to slash a flight attendant’s throat, and fly her airplane into the side of a skyscraper. Or the right to strap high explosives to your midriff and scatter Jewish baby parts all over with it. Our fundamental rights are under attack.

Let’s see if the blogosphere has any power. Maybe if we generate enough outrage, they’ll reconsider it, and change it.

[Thanks to “JMiller” via email]

Instantman informs us that my latest column is up at Tech Central Station. The author’s always the last to know…

For those interested, I get medieval on the sustainable developers’ asses.

[12 PM Update]

Reader Chris Savage picks a nit, and math checks my ass:

A little poetic license here:

“The reality is that the notion of anything off planet representing a resource is anathema to them. For one thing, it would imply essentially unlimited resources for the foreseeable future, since the amount of energy and useful material in space vastly exceeds that on the single tiny planet on which we evolved, which in turn represents such an infinitesimal fraction of the universe that this column would run way over page limit were I simply to write the number of zeros required after the decimal point, and before the one, to express it. ”

Let’s assume that the universe is a sphere 20 billion light-years across.

Then, assuming my math is right, the volume of the universe is roughly 10^110 cubic angstroms.

If we assume that the Earth’s resources are proportional to its volume, that turns out to be roughly 10^60 cubic angstroms.

It follows that Earth’s share of the resources of the entire universe is no less than about 1/10^50, or, roughly:

0.00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001,

or:

0.00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000001%

Now, your basic point is valid: if we could effectively access the resources available off-planet, we’d have gobs more resources. But it doesn’t take *that* many zeros to express either how big the universe is, or how small our piece of it is.

Check my math, but I could be off by a factor of, say, 10^60 and only add one line to your article… [g]>

Well, Chris, you just don’t know how vicious Tech Central editor Nick Schultz is for authors who go over word count.

Actually, I don’t either, but I don’t want to find out…

Despite the fact that even Lance Bass doesn’t seem to have enough money to go, there are some successful commercial space activities.

Space manufacturing, and space tourism and entertainment, won’t really take off until the necessary investments are made in high flight-rate, low-cost launch systems–systems that will make affordable the movement of the large amounts of mass necessary to make them happen.

But because space launch remains extremely expensive, the only commercial ventures, so far, that have been successful are those that can generate large amounts of revenue with the delivery of a relatively small amount of mass to space. Fortunately, there’s a valuable commercial product that can be produced in space, and cheaply delivered to and from there, because it has very low mass. In fact, it has zero rest mass. They’re called photons, the stuff of light and…telecommunications.

Bandwidth has long since become a commodity, and in today’s market, communications satellites are almost a license to print money.

Once properly stationed in geostationary orbit, positioned far above a specific point on the earth’s equator, a single transponder on one can lease for millions of dollars per year. Since the typical satellite has a dozen or more such transponders, the revenue from one can generate tens of millions of dollars per year, and even at high launch costs, still pay for itself very quickly.

However, the high value of a transponder-year is a double-edged sword. Even a month’s delay in launch can correspondingly mean a loss of many millions of dollars of revenue for its operator.

For this reason, launch operators compete on many factors other than the pure price of the launch. A satellite owner will cheerfully pay a ten million dollar premium to have his satellite delivered two months earlier. Similarly, she’ll pay a lot to make sure that it gets safely to its designated spot, because even at high launch costs, the launch is still a small fraction of the total cost of building, delivering, and operating a modern communications satellite.

This is a factor that’s made it very difficult for new entrants in the satellite launch market, because the market isn’t very large, and the existing customers are very wary of unproven providers. This is one reason that I encourage anyone who wants to change the launch paradigm to go after unconventional markets–the existing market just doesn’t want to play.

There is, however, one area in which they may welcome new approaches, because they can represent low risk, with a very high payoff.

For reasons already stated, getting a satellite up sooner is not the only schedule parameter of interest. At the end of life, providing just a few additional weeks of satellite life can also be worth millions.

One other feature that launch providers compete with is payload capability to geostationary orbit (the location of most comsats). That’s because even a few extra pounds can allow the operator to load more propellant for keeping the satellite “on station,” and for pointing it, both necessary to allow it to operate, and hence extending its useful revenue-generating life.

There have been many concepts studied over the years for extending the useful life of comsats, but most of them involved changing the design of the satellite itself (e.g., to allow refueling or propellant tank changeout), and the owners weren’t willing to spend the money, given that the capability wasn’t proven. But one of the concepts considered in the past, by NASA and its contractors, was an orbital “tug” that could keep the “bird” in position, and point it, and even move it into a safe parking orbit, above geosynchronous, when it was so degraded that it had become obsolete and had to be replaced by another in its designated slot.

So what’s new?

As opposed to simply studying it, someone is actually funding the idea. With private money.

The money comes from Walt Anderson, a long-time guardian angel of space entrepreneurs. He funded the failed Rotary Rocket company, and more recently, Mircorp, which has been working mightily (but perhaps in vain) to get Lance Bass into space.

He’s uniquely qualified for such a venture, having both the money and the knowledge, because he made his fortune in space telecommunications. He’s an excellent example of the old aphorism, “…if you want to make a small fortune in the space business, start with a large one…”

He admits himself that he makes money on the telecom side so that he can spend it on the space side, with the hope that one of his bets will pay off.

This looks like a good one. One of the interesting aspects of the concept is that it’s one of the first commercial applications of ion propulsion. While it sounds Star Trekkish, this is a means of providing extremely efficient propellant economy to a spacecraft, by using ions accelerated to very high velocities, and the energy of the sun to power it, rather than conventional rocket propellants, which most satellites use. So the system can do the job with much less mass, or conversely, for a given amount of propellant, it can provide a “walker” for an aging comsat well into its dotage.

My only concern is that once the big boys (i.e., Boeing-Hughes) figure out that it’s a potential gold mine, they’ll go after it themselves, and with their infinitely-larger financial resources, run the newcomer into the ground.

But they’re not as spry, and there’s a big market, so I think that there’s a good chance that Walt will win out. But even if they don’t, he’ll likely find a niche that gets his money back, and he finally got the conventional industry off their duffs. And that’s what competition, and free enterprise, are all about.

There’s a new auction site on the Internet. For all those usually hard-to-get items, it’s a one-stop shop of government favors.

Check out Sacramento-based E-Gray where everything has a price.

[Thanks to Lloyd Albano]

Bill says he’s “full of regret” that he didn’t get bin Laden. No doubt, as he continues to watch the vestiges of his “legacy” spin down the old crapper.

“I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well placed, and I was full of regret that I didn’t get him,” he said.

I can’t stand to watch Larry King, but I’d be willing to bet that this statement was not challenged in any way by the sycophantic softballmeister.

“Virtual obsession”?

Like when he told the Sudanese to ship him to Saudi Arabia instead of taking custody of him? Like when he sent a few cruise missiles into empty Afghan terrorist camps? Maybe such ineffective and inattentive actions are why he calls it a “virtual” obsession. It’s certainly not the mark of a real one.

We know what his real obsessions are, and they have nothing to do with either terrorism specifically, or national security in general. And amidst all the big-money speeches, and mindless fawning females, he no doubt continues to indulge them.