perfidy

Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize, has been awarded the Heinlein Prize for his contributions to the commercialization of space. A good choice, I think. Rutan may have built SpaceShipOne, but Diamandis got hundreds of companies working toward the goal of private space enterprise. We need more like him, and hopefully there will be cause for more Heinlein Prizes to be awarded soon.

In a move long hoped for, NASA is taking a serious step towards supporting the growth of the commercial space industry. As I have often argued here, one of the best models for space development would be that of the early commercial aviation industry. In its infancy, commercial aviation was given a crucial boost from the Post Office, which gave contracts for airmail delivery. The Post Office in effect created the first networks of airports and air routes as proto-airlines set up networks to deliver the mail. Thanks to Post Office encouragement, passenger travel grew, following these smae routes. Money from Air Mail contracts also spurred developments in aircraft design, as these companies took advantage of the opportunities made available. The Post Office became a lever that boosted the aviation industry past the first hump of development. Once it was seen that the government believed that aviation was possible, other means of support (like bank loans and other investors) became possible as well.

The golden age of flight was created in part by two outside factors - Air Mail and the collection of prizes for achievements in aviation. We have already seen the positive effect of lever - the Ansari X-prize. There are other prizes already waiting and more being created, and I am convinced that these will prove to be a powerful stimulus as well. This move by NASA puts in place another lever. By offering the modern equivalent of the old Post Office Air Mail contracts, the govenment and NASA will be doing the most useful thing they could possibly do. By underwriting development, they can help private space industry get over the big first hurdle. More to the point, they will do it in a way that (for the first time in NASA history) that development will serve as a platform for further development. In almost fifty years of space travel, we have never made a serious effort to develop a space transportation infrastructure. But now, government money might actually do us some good.

"Traditionally, Uncle Sam has done this many times before," said van der Linden. "Prove it can be done, help business get involved and when business can make money, you step back and everybody benefits."

I am well pleased with NASA.

[wik] Bob van der Linden, the Smithsonian curator mentioned at the end of the article, works with my dad. He's a cool guy, buy his books.

[alsø wik] I was shocked, shocked, that Transterrestrial Musings hadn't already posted on this. I hope to see some commentary on this from him.

[alsø alsø wik] And my being well pleased with NASA is of course predicated on NASA actually following through and actually, you know, spending that money in the way described. However, this is the most concrete statement of this kind I've heard from them, so I actually have some hope. $500 mil is real money. Rutan did SpaceShipOne (I still think that name is seriously lame) for a fraction of that sum. This could do some real good.

NASA has released a video of a Lunar meteorite impact.

Bigelow Aerospace is launching a 1/3 scale prototype of its inflatable space habitat late next week, and will launch a second in September. Bigelow hopes that this technology will end up drastically lowering the cost of space travel by spurring the development of new space vehicles, while simultaneously making trillions as the first real estate developer in space. Hopefully, we will get habitats on a more human scale by decade’s end.

Bigelow, btw, is the same guy behind the next big space prize – the $50 meelion dollar giveaway for the first people to orbit the earth without spending government money.

You're up in orbit, crashing out in your inflatable zero-g lovenest. But there's this kickin party over in Lunar orbit. What do you do on the way out? Stop at a space gas station of course, and tank up on cryogenic fuels and beef jerky.

I promised Johno I wouldn't do it, but at least this time it's not the title of the post: the Chinkonauts are getting uppity

Today is my last day of work. Until next Tuesday, anyway. What with wrapping up projects at my soon to be ex-place of employment, I am rather busy. But here are a few spacely tidbits to occupy your mind:

• Zoe Brain has an in-depth and critical look at NASA's Apollo retread, I mean CEV program. I would offer detailed comments, but that would be gilding the lilly, as I agree with everything she says.
• Alan Stern, the big brain responsible for the New Horizons Pluto Mission, has an exceedingly clever idea for supplying our future moon colonists with water. To save money, effort and time, he insists, we need not bother with cumbersome and outmoded concepts like actually decelerating our water when it reaches the moon. Water ice can simply be crashed into the moon like a comet, where it will accomodatingly enough bury itself a few feet under the Lunar regolith, there safe from evaporation but still easy to get to. Apparently, only about 15% of the water will be lost on impact, and as an added bonus, we get to do comet research by studying the impact craters.
• Also from space.com, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is expected to cross the outermost limits of the solar system, the termination shock. Which sounds suspiciously like what happened to me one Friday about two years ago this week. In this case, however, Voyager will hopefully provide some info on why the heliosphere is all funny shaped.
• Rand Simberg on SDLVness, EELVness, and other expensive and ill-thought NASA acronyms.

Over at Space.com, I read that Burt Rutan has said of the proposed NASA CEV, that it is more like archaeology than rocket science. All too true, and I nearly aspirated my diet coke.

Other choice quotes:

“They are forcing the program to be done with technology that we already know works. They are not creating an environment where it is possible to have a breakthrough,” Rutan advised. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, contending that programs must encourage risks “in order to stumble into breakthroughs.”

...Rutan said if he was the NASA Administrator, he would call a major press conference about the agency plans to go back to the Moon. “I’d go in front of the microphone,” Rutan said, “and I’d scream at the top of my lungs, ‘this is stupid,’ then turn around and head back to the office and go back to work. If we copy what we had it won’t be affordable enough or safe enough,” Rutan said, to foster human space travel beyond low Earth orbit, to the Moon, and outward.

NASA’s space shuttle is complex and generically dangerous, Rutan pointed out. Still, not flying the shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope is symbolic of a larger issue. “The budget forecast [for NASA] is to go out and spend hundreds of billions of dollar to go to Mars and yet you don’t have the courage to go back to the Hubble … it looks like you got the wrong guys doing it,” Rutan concluded.

If there is a benevolent and loving God watching over us, the government will not get in his way, and we will have real space travel in our lifetime. You figure the odds, 'cause Rutan just pissed off a lot of people. All the more so because he is exactly right.

The Ministry is now bound for the vasty deeps of space, riding a beam of light and yodeling like Slim Pickens on the A-Bomb in Dr. Strangelove.

Well, not really. But the European Space Agency's Venus Express probe appears to have made orbit around our toasty sister planet, and will begin its two-day mission to, well, probe, the secrets hidden behind the ever present clouds. In case you're wondering why the mission is so short, that's Venusian days, which are about five hundred times longer than our pathetic Earth days.

Pretty cool, as this is the first mission to Venus for the Europeans, and the first mission at all in over a decade.

A nautical light year is 1.15 times longer than a statute light year.

No one on Mars would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than and yet as mortal as his own; that as Martians busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency they went to and fro over this red globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter...

At most they there might be other men upon the blue world, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Mars with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the new millenium came the great disillusionment.

Google Maps has now embraced the Red Planet.

It's only a matter of time before the moon is a giant red and blue yin-yang urging us to drink Pepsi. A new company on Cape Cod, Roofshout.com, is trying to monetize the experience of getting your house's picture on satellite-image-driven services like Google Earth. You could help pay your mortgage with a small tasteful rooftop ad for, say, GOLDENPALACE.COM or POKERPARTY.COM or

PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS

that just happens to be visible from space.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the future. Use it wisely.

Three years ago today, Rick Husband, William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, David Brown, Michael Anderson and Ilan Ramon perished when the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry over Texas. Four days and twenty years ago Francis “Dick” Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe died a few minutes after the explosion that destroyed the Challenger. And five days and 39 years ago, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were consumed by the Apollo 1 fire on the pad at Cape Canaveral.

This is a bad time of year for NASA, and for anyone who thinks that the future of mankind lies with the stars. Space travel is more than merely dangerous, it is fatal. It is fatal not just because the environment of space is inherently lethal. It is fatal because launch operators who are tasked with assessing the relative risks of launches are human, and make tragic mistakes due to lack of knowledge, hubris, or political pressure. It is because the politicians and managers who fund space development are only human, and political compromise and venality leads to fatal constraints on design. It is because the people who design the vehicles are human, and design less than perfect vehicles for astronauts to fly.

The astronauts accept these risks, knowing that the vehicles they fly, and that the people who make the decisions that could cost them their lives are far from perfect. Seventeen people dead in forty years is a high price for going into space, perhaps. And even higher price would be not doing it at all.

Peter Diamandis - the saint-like personage responsible for both the X-Prize and the vast inflation of the hopes of space geeks everywhere - looks like he is within reach of forming an honest to God rocket racing league. Combining the best aspects of current day NASCAR racing and the golden age of aircraft racing, the Rocket Racing League's competitors will fly modified versions of XCOR Aerospace's EZ-Rocket design over complex three dimensional courses, combining gliding with strategically-timed rocket burns to achieve the best time.

F-16 pilots Robert “Bobaloo” Rickard and Don “Dagger” Grantham paid their $100,000 deposit to the league yesterday, to become the first of what the League hopes will be ten teams in the 2007 inaugural season. The hundred grand will go to the expected million-dollar-plus cost of their Mark-1 X-Racer. Operating costs for the rocket and the race team will easily be on the order of a million dollars a year. But hey, they're racing rockets.

I will certainly be glued to the tv when this all comes together. And if it leads to the development of better rocket technology, well that'll just be pure gravy.

Rand over there at Transterrestrial Musings has had some good stuff recently. One that caught my eye was the post I just linked, regarding the use of rotating tethers to fling payloads and passengers from Earth orbit to the moon. There's a lot of good commentary in the, uh, comments - so read it all.

This is, I think, a very good idea. It's practically all upside. A 100km tether would be able to fling a payload to the moon, and then use the Earth's own magnetic field to recharge so that it can launch the next payload. Essentially, we can get one fourth of the momentum needed for a lunar round trip for absolutely nothing. Okay, for the amortized cost of building and launching the tether.

But there is more to it than that. Before learning how to make large, 100km tethers, we would need to practice on baby tethers. However, they would not be merely experimental artifacts with no practical use. Smaller tethers would serve an immediate need in allowing payloads to be shifted to higher orbits. And the skills learned in building and operating these tethers are obviously directly applicable to constructing larger ones.

Larger tethers have multiple uses. A rotovator could dip into the upper atmosphere and grab a vehicle like Rutan's SpaceShipOne, reducing the cost to get off the earth. A tether in lunar orbit could catch incoming payloads from the Earth, or coming up from the Lunar surface. While Lunar tethers could not use magnetic fields to recharge (the Moon has a very weak magnetic field) one of the niftiest properties of a rotating tether is that it can serve as a momentum bank, like a flywheel. A ship inbound from Earth will have momentum, which is transferred to the tether when it is caught and lowered to the center. That linear momentum is stored in the spinning tether as angular momentum. Sometime later, that ship or another could use that energy to launch itself back toward the earth. Naturally, there'd be some losses. But it would mean an end to spending energy to launch each ship individually. Just do it once, and use that energy over and over. A high traffic rate between the Earth and moon would only improve matters, making it easier to balance the load.

The real advantage would lie in having a system of rotating tethers, located around the solar system. Tethers to catch relatively low-powered suborbital launch vehicles coming up from Earth and pass them up to orbit. Inter-orbit tethers to fling payloads back and forth. Larger tethers to fling ships to and from the earth, and even further afield. And practice building rotating tethers is in the end practice building space elevators.

There are some problems, most notably the issue of guidance and "catching" incoming payloads. Launching, by comparison, is easy. But like most technical problems, there will certainly be a technical solution. The only way to get to the point where that matters, though, is to go ahead and start building tethers - and given NASA's current state, that isn't terribly likely.

It's not every day you read about a significant breakthrough in rocket propulsion -- in this case a fourfold improvement in the exit velocity of ions for an ion (electric) space drive. That's cool 'cause it's directly proportional -- a 4x increase in overall efficiency. This one's called the DS4G -- they have four "grids" that are used to accelerate the ions. I hereby patent the DS8G and the DS16G. You losers can have the other ones -- they're impossible (like 5 minute abs).

Check out the Aero-News Net story that I found on it; I suppose it'll show up elsewhere soon. But the fun doesn't end there!

Sometimes scientists take embarrassing pictures of themselves and put them on the web, and sometimes the universities pull those pages down before the public can see them. And then sometimes google caches them for us, and sometimes smirky tech dudes grab the page and save them to preserve the moments. Read the last week's test report from the DS4G team, and amuse yourself with images of science victories!

And seriously...congratulations to the technical team and the theory guys who make it all possible. Space is cool.

One of those American Voices bits, where they recycle the same six pictures giving opinions on different subjects. The topic: A planet-killer asteroid may hit the earth in 2036. What do you think?

The best response, well, possibly ever: "This sounds like something that would have to be co-managed by NASA and FEMA. God help us all."

If you have been unable to concentrate or sleep for not knowing where the International Space Station is, relief is at hand.

[wik] Helpful Reader Ric informs us that there is an even better site for satellite-keeping-track-of. Heavens Above allows you to enter your exact location, and tells you when stuff will be overhead. Awfully damn nifty.

Here's some links to a few interesting articles/posts on space matters I ran across today:

• A basic summary of the prospects for asteroid mining
• The wonderful Space Review takes a look at Elon Musk and SpaceX.
• And finally, hobbyspace takes a jaundiced look at NASA's funding priorities.

Brickmuppet informed me - oh, jeez, last week or so - of his post on the new Orion research. I've been meaning to throw a link up, but I am a slacker. But not completely so, and here it is.

Orion, for those not in the know, was a program in the late fifties intended to produce a working spaceship powered by atomic bombs. On the face of it, this sounds like a rather spectacular sort of lunacy. But the eggheads in charge were the real deal, and they had it all scoped out. By inventing on the spot a sort of nuclear shaped charge, they were able to focus the energy of the blast where it would do the most good, propulsion-wise. They envisioned a massive steel pusher plate that was to be connected to the ship by the largest shock absorbers you can imagine. And they scaled up a coke vending machine to colossal size to eject the bombs from their magazine.

All the theoretical stuff was worked out. They exploded bombs, and got the results they expected. They built a scale model, named "Putt-Putt" that was propelled my ordinary chemical explosives. On its first flight, it went miles into the air. Everything was on track for the construction of a spaceship that would loft payloads the size of a WWII US Navy cruiser straight into orbit. Travel times to nearby planets would be in weeks. The outer system would take only months. And no screwing around with tiny, tiny robot probes that always point their antennae toward Sirius - just fire up an Orion, and you'd have a full crew of scientists in orbit around your holiday destination of choice.

And this, mind you, would have been in the sixties. The scientists on the project were saying, screw the moon, we can be to Saturn by the end of the decade.

Ignorance and the prejudices of others brought an untimely end to this project. But now, people are looking at the idea all over again. This time, it won't be actual bombs, but rather - well, hear it from the Brickmuppet:

The new system has several improvements over the original version as it disposes of the actual atom bombs in favor of using a magnetic system to pinch the fuel into critical mass....this allows far more controlability!. This is much closer to the classic science fiction view of a spaceship engine. It also doesn't require having lots of atom bombs lying around for your spaceship (and what space entrepanuer wants the ATF hassles THAT would bring?)

Check out the homepage for the researchers, here. As BM says, this would actually give us a reason for the proposed heavy lift vehicle. But, as is typical with space policy issues, we run into the chicken egg problem. Without heavy lift (and a lot of research) the Orion isn't feasible. Without Orion (or some other program requiring the kind of payload only a big dumb booster can provide) there's no reason to develop it.

There is no reason to expect that NASA or the government will do anything even faintly resembling smart. But the likelihood of private space gaining a toehold is getting better by the day. And once they have that toehold, they can begin to ratchet their way to ever larger capabilities, fueled at each stage by incremental growth in both flight envelope and profitability.

Alert readers will have noted in me from time to time a mild disdain for our nation's space policy. I wonder now whether there is a genetic component to this feeling, as a result of a conversation last night with my son. Yesterday evening was mild, mostly clear with clouds swiftly scudding across the night sky. It was the full moon, and the light was nearly bright enough to read by.

My son and I accompanied our dog into the backyard, and John pointed up to the moon and said, "We need a rocketship." I was surprised by this – I had not intended to begin space policy indoctrination for several years. I don't even know for certain if I have ever even mentioned the word "rocketship" in little John's presence.

I replied, "Yes, we do need a rocketship. But there aren't any rocketships that can take us to the moon."

Aware, apparently, that he is in the 21st century, John cut right to the heart of the problem: "Where'd the rocketships go?"

I was forced to tell him, "We had rocketships once, but we threw them away." John wrinkled his forehead and grimaced at this information. Unsure if 'ol Dad was telling true, he asked again, "Where'd the rocketships go?"

I said again that yes, we had once had them but we threw them away.

"We need a rocketship."

Truer words have never been spoken. To do things in space, you need rocketships. Not plans for rocketships, or budgetary allocations for rocketship development, or a roadmap to space development. Rocketships. To get rocketships, you need to build them. NASA has not built a rocketship in twenty years. Kind of a pisspoor track record for a rocketship building agency, non? And even that last, solitary rocketship was based on a ten-year-old design.

So I told him, "Someday, someone will build rocketships again. And when they do, you and I will ride a rocketship to the moon."

I have little faith that NASA will do it, but there's always Burt Rutan.