There’s a new history of the Space Shuttle over at the NASA web site. I haven’t read it, but it’s written by Tom Heppenheimer, who’s usually pretty scrupulous in his work, and has never been much of a NASA cheerleader. So I’ll give it a qualified endorsement, for those who are interested in how the Shuttle came to be the way it is, warts and all. I do hope to getting around to reading it soon and doing an actual review.

In a major turn of events in the story yesterday that many thought was another “hate-crime” dragging of a black man, it turned out that an angry girlfriend actually stabbed him in the, er…behind.

In a major turn of events in the story yesterday that many thought was another “hate-crime” dragging of a black man, it turned out that an angry girlfriend actually stabbed him in the, er…behind.

In a major turn of events in the story yesterday that many thought was another “hate-crime” dragging of a black man, it turned out that an angry girlfriend actually stabbed him in the, er…behind.

More progress on the nanotech front–single-molecule transistors using a single cobalt atom as a gate. It’s going to be hard to get much smaller than that. No word on how long until we have practical devices.

Charles Murtaugh proposes building an undersea colony to test out social conditions in a space colony, with the rationale that it is a similarly harsh environment, and could prove out predictions about the state of civil liberties in such a place.

There are a couple of problems with this. The first is that I don’t know anyone who wants to live at the bottom of the ocean (I know lots of folks who’d like to live in space). I won’t go into the reasons for this right now, but just state it as a fact, at least in my experience. I’ll be interested in hearing of any counterexamples.

The second is that the undersea environment is much, much harsher than the space environment. The only thing that’s easier about it is the cost of accessing it. Everything else, from a habitat-design standpoint is tremendously more difficult.

It’s much easier to design to a vacuum than many atmospheres of negative pressure. The hazards of firing a gun in a well-designed space colony are vastly overblown (pardon the expression), but damaging a negative pressure vessel with a large amount of overpressure would result in an instantaneous and catastrophic collapse.

The third is that space provides interesting and potentially-useful environments for industrial production (large amounts of energy and materials, cheap vacuum, weightlessness). If the ocean were a good environment for technology development/production, the dolphins would have beaten us to the technological punch.

For these reasons (and others) I think that we’ll have space colonies long before we have undersea colonies, but I’m interested in counterarguments.

The good news is that my Fox News column is up. The bad news is that the Fox web site is down, and has been for the past few hours, so I don’t know what it looks like, or the URL. I’m guessing it’s a denial of service attack, and I’m told they’re working it.

[Update at 2PM PDT]

The Fox site is still pretty much shut down. I’ve managed to get a few bytes and partial pages, but they’ve got big-time problems. Hopefully they’ll get it sorted out before my column is replaced with the next one…

The six months are up. The ABM Treaty expired today, as far as the US is concerned.

Let it be buried with other misbegotten relics of the Cold War.

According to this press release from yesterday, NASA is stretching out their buy of Shuttle External Tanks. I mention this because it’s a perfect example of why space is so expensive, and it has nothing to do with the fact that it’s “hard,” or because it’s persnickety rocket science.

No, we’re going to spend more money to save money.

The original tank contract was to deliver eight tanks per year. Because of annual budget constraints, imposed by the International Space Station overruns, they can’t afford that many. You see, NASA doesn’t have a program budget–they only have an annual budget, and they have to go back to Congress for more money each year. It saves them money by flying fewer Shuttle flights each year, so this is a way of keeping that annual budget down.

The problem is, that they still have to fly the same total number of flights to accomplish the space station assembly, so they have to stretch out the schedule. That means that the contract to deliver the external tanks has to run longer. That means that the contractor (in this case Lockheed Martin) has a longer period of time in which it has to keep its facilities and staff available, even though the number of tanks being produced is the same. That means that the total program cost just went up, even though the annual cost went down.

I don’t know what the total original contract value is–the press release doesn’t say, but knowing that tanks have been costing around fifty million dollars apiece, and they’re buying thirty five of them, one and three quarters of a billion dollars is a not-unreasonable number.

[Update at 2:50 PM]

Doh!@

Have to work on my reading comprehension–it does say, in the first graf, that the original contract value was 1.15 billion, so this is actually a much greater percentage increase.

[End update]

The press release says that they’re increasing the contract value by about $340M, (presumably) to cover the overhead costs of keeping the lines going for the additional period of time. That means that they’ve increased the total contract cost by about twenty percent, or roughly ten million per tank. For exactly the same tank–no extra features, no new alloys, same weight so there’s no payload benefit–just delivered later.

Instead of stretching the contract, couldn’t they have warehoused the extras? Perhaps, but that would mean building warehouses (these things are not small), and hiring people to keep an eye on the stock, and making sure that it didn’t corrode or deteriorate, or get damaged in any way. The system’s not really set up to operate like that–it’s Just In Time.

So, we’re spending more, to do less (or at least to do it more slowly).

This is, in fact, a microcosm of exactly why the Shuttle overall costs as much as it does. During its development, the budget constraint was on annual budget. They had to pinch pennies in development to maintain the annual budget cap, which meant that there were many design decisions made at the time, back in the seventies, that saved money in any given year, but had many billions of dollars of program consequences down the road as they got into operations.

This is one reason (of many) why we should never expect NASA to reduce the cost of access to space.

This rare poem by Kathy Kinsley (aka the Bellicose Babe), jogged my memory of something that I instigated in sci.space.policy (preblogging days) right after September 11. Hardly anyone was talking about space policy, and all of the discussion was angry, about what was happening, and wondering what was going to happen next. To break the tension, I started a little space policy haiku contest. Some of them turned into September 11 haiku, so I thought I’d publish a few of them here.

This first one seems appropriate, in light of Professor Reynolds TCS column today:

Freedom

Frontiers give freedom
Freedom makes tyrants tremble
New frontiers we seek

Doug Jones

Here’s another one from Doug:

Healing

Grand goals, uplifting
Sorrow brings tears -and laughter
Catharsis begins

Doug Jones

And a nice one, from Chris Winter:

Lower Manhattan, 9.11.01

Rubble fills the sky.
White dust blows upon the wind,
Covering heroes.

Chris Winter

A couple more from Doug:

Inspiration

Twin towers crash down
Vengeance may lash out blindly
Stars rise above all

Doug Jones

Dual Use

Sabers rattle loud
Swords can also be levers
Lift us up to stars

Doug Jones

Here are two (untitled) from Doug’s boss at XCOR, Jeff Greason:

Pacifists argue
No weapons in space for us!
Others will not wait

Communism falls
Tourists fly Russian rockets
Will we lose the sky?

Jeff Greason

And finally, Andrew Case wrote defiantly:

Carrying On

We do not fear you
Vile Osama bin Laden
We make space haiku

Andrew Case

There were others (pure space policy ones, and good ones, too), but I thought I’d focus more on the war-related ones in this post. I’ve included none of my own because they were space policy.