Dear Friends,
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that Walt Staples, who was blogging with me, was going in for some medical tests and wouldn't be writing. Apparently, things were worse than anyone thought.
Walt died Wednesday, March 14, sitting in a bus stop. Whatever took him was quick, unexpected and apparently painless.
Walt and I met in the chat room of The Catholic Writers' Guild, and I roped him into running for Guild President, a position he held with charity and panache, just like everything he'd done. When I started this blog, he kibitzed with me on it online, and again, I convinced him to help out. His stories about growing up during the Space Race of the 60s were, for me, the highlight of week. He did more than that, however; every day, I could be sure to find some news article about space that he'd found and thought to forward with me. Sometimes, it was a point of honor to be able to say, "I saw that already!"
EB White said in Charlotte's Web: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” Like Charlotte, Walt was both. He's going to be greatly missed.
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I'm going to take all his articles and put them together on a separate page on this blog.
If anyone would like to send something to his family, e-mail me and I'll get you his address. If you want to leave a comment about him here, I'm going to collect them and send them.
RIP Walt Staples
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On Haitus
I've got company coming, then I'm at the Catholic Writers Conference Online, so I'm not posting again until April. in the meantime, please check out my daily newsletter, Fabian's Space News, by clicking on the link to the left, or clicking here.
Need your help
Dear readers,
Yesterday, I got a letter from Walt Staples, who has been taking us on a stroll down memory lane with his Watching the Space Race columns. (I hope you've enjoyed his posts as much as I have.) He's having some medical issues and needs to discontinue his series, at least for the short term.
Walt and I both believe in the power of prayer. If you are religious, would you please remember him in your prayers and petitions as he goes through testing and whatever those tests reveal? If you are not the praying type, please keep him in your thoughts. He reads the blog, so if you'd like to leave him a comment, please do!
Thanks,
Karina
MItt Romney on Space--Let's Study it
"A strong and vibrant space program is part of being an exceptional nation. A mission for that space program is essential."
I searched Romney's website, Googled news and looked at the one YouTube speech from Cap Canaveral to learn about Mitt Romney's campaign. I'm sorry, guys, but that is the most direct thing I could find. The rest was his opinion that Newt Gingrich is fiscally irresponsible with his lunar colony idea and accusations that he's just pandering to the people of the Space Coast, and Roney's vow to put together a group of key advisers to study what we should do with space. Even his campaign speech in Cape Canaveral said little about his actual plans, but was more about the campaign itself and how he feels President Obama does not understand American values. Here's the only complete speech I can find. There was nothing on his campaign website, though I have contacted them to see if they can provide me with something more concrete.
My own opinion: How often has the government studied the space program? If I may put on my fortune teller's cap for a moment, I see...
- In his first year, Romney calls together "experts" from a wide range of space interests, each with their own personal favorites to defend.
- A year and several million dollars of government money later, they will come to the conclusion that 1. space is important 2. we need to keep exploring 3. we should support maned and unmanned mission for research and colonization, both near earth and within the solar system, focusing on jobs and economic growth. There will probably be a phrase to the effect of promoting synergy between commercial industry and government contractors, probably using the awards program we already have... Anyone see where I'm going with this?
- Romney will recommend some changes that the Democrats will fight because he's Republican.
- Assuming he's successful, his plan will have 2-6 years unless he does something sweeping and grand. (Must say, I don't see him as the sweeping and grand change type of guy. Besides, grand and sweeping changes mean big disruption, and by now, he's looking at Congressional elections if not the Presidential.)
My own opinion: If you want to study, then forget calling together a team. Hire a national think tank like RAND corp to do an independent study--and be sure you've got what it takes to back that study up with a plan that will survive.
Just want to remind folks that no campaign is a single-issue. I have e-mailed the Romney campaign for more info and will post it when I get it. Ditto for Rick Santorum, for whom I've found nothing except assertions that Gingrich's lunar colony is fiscally irresponsible. If anyone has any thing concrete concerning the space policies of these gentlemen, I'd be glad for the leads.
Watching the Space Race: A Better Engineer than Economist
by Walt Staples
The face of America's space effort from early on was Dr. Wernher von Braun. In the mid-to-late 50s, we kids became aware of him and indulged in some harmless hero worship. I first saw him on Walt Disney's “Disneyland” TV show, when von Braun appeared in “Disney's Man in Space” episodes (“Man in Space”--spring 1955—and “Man and the Moon”--Christmas 1955). He had everything going for him that NASA could ask for; good looks, a slight German accent, a comfortable speaking style, and the ability to make you believe that manned space flight was just around the corner. This was increased by the release of his movie biography in 1960, “I Aim at the Stars,” in which he's portrayed by the guy who played the honorable U-Boat skipper opposite Robert Mitchum in “The Enemy Below” (Curt Jurgens).
Half a century later, feelings about von Braun are rather more mixed. One of the problems with being an adult is that your heroes become real people having the warts with which we're all prone. Like most of us, he had a history—in his case, one NASA's PR folks would have cringed over if it had been noised around at the time. Whether there was guilt or innocence, I'll let the final Arbiter decide. Instead, there's von Braun and his vision and the fact that he was no economist.
Looking at a manned flight to Mars, as depicted in his books, Project Mars: A Technical Tale (1950) and The Mars Project (1953), one must admit that the man thought big.
The first step he called for was to lift the parts required to build ten interplanetary ships for the flight to Mars to Earth orbit. According to the 1953 book, three of the craft would be winged landers and the rest would carry consumables to Mars orbit and return. To lift these parts and consumables would require 950 flights to low MEO (Medium Earth Orbit*) by 46 three-stage transports, each of which would carry a payload of 80,000 pounds (36,290 kg). Each flight would burn 11,166,000 pounds (5,064,812 kg) of propellant—the total for all the flights would run to 10,640,000,000 pounds (4,826222,817 kg)--as he helpfully points out, this is about ten times the total amount of fuel used during the 1948 Berlin airlift or about 443 tankers of the period having a displacement of 12,000 tons. He figures this would cost about $500,000,000 in 1953 dollars using $100 per ton (about a nickle a pound or approximately seven times what a gallon of gasoline would have cost at the time—as a WAG on my part, this comes out to something like $7,600,000,000 in present day dollars). And yes, we are throwing around units of billions here, boys and girls. To help visualize the amount we're talking about, NASA's total budget for 2010 was $18,724,000,000 (its initial budget of $89,000,000 when started in 1957 was equivalent to $448,000,000 in 2007 dollars). Mind you, that this is merely the fuel cost to MEO; it doesn't include the fabrication of any of the spacecraft, either orbital or interplanetary, their crewing and supplies, or ground support. On these small items, his book is silent.
Once the parts were in orbit and the interplanetary craft were assembled and stocked, the 70 man crew (and remember, this is 1953, so it would be “man”) would depart Earth orbit and begin their 260 day-long voyage to Mars orbit.
On reaching Mars, the three “landing boats” carrying a total of 50 men would use their extremely large wings to make aircraft-type landings on the surface. The wings in question would be required to give lift in an atmosphere whose pressure he gives as 1/12th that of Earth's 15 pounds per square inch at sea level (63 N). Von Braun considered this offset somewhat by the lighter Martian gravity which he gives as .38 G. The first lander would make a ski-equipped landing in the polar region. The crew would then abandon the spacecraft, trek to the Martian Equator, and prepare a landing strip for the other two wheel-equipped landers.
After 400 days on the surface, the pair of Equatorial landers, with wings removed and fuselages raised to a vertical orientation, would return to Mars orbit where they would be abandoned. The total crew would then depart in the remaining spacecraft on their 260 day flight back to Earth orbit, where they would transfer to winged transports for return to the surface.
To my mind, von Braun envisioned an effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project. In his novel, Project Mars: A Technical Tale, he puts forth a UN-like “World Legislature” that fulfills the mission (one suspects that the book was largely finished before Kim Jong-un's grandaddy decided that he wanted all of Korea and came boiling across the 38th Parallel in the summer of 1950). The reason for this massive push is the evidence that Mars supported intelligent life (another thing to remember, Martian canals were still fairly respectable into the 1960s. It wasn't until the 1965 Mariner 4 flyby that the stake was finally driven into their hearts). Unfortunately, here von Braun's imagination falters, and the reader learns that the inhabitants of Mars are just folks like us (though having big heads, of course, and being much wiser and friendly—haven't I tripped over this meme somewhere before?).
The result leaves me, at least, of the opinion that Wernher von Braun was a far better engineer than a economist--or a xenobiologist.
* LEO = up to 1,243 miles [2,000 km]--MEO = from LEO to GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit), 22,236 miles [35,786 km]
Funding long-term space projects
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| If American politics continues as it is, this ship will be Commercial or Chinese. |
Article: Scientists See Red on NASA Cuts of Mars Missions
When I started this blog, one of my first entries was about Pres. Obama's radical changes in space policy, scrapping Bush's heavy-lift program, which was to replace the Shuttle and eventually get us to the moon. (See original article here.) Later Obama revived the program, making it more about going to Mars, while leaving commercial space for the near-Earth stuff. He announced his intention to get us to Mars by the 2030s--a grandiose promise, considering he won't be President after another one to five years.
Sadly, he didn't even keep his vector for the four years he had guaranteed in office.
Two years ago, President Barack Obama stood in Kennedy Space Center and said it was more of a priority than going to the moon and wanted astronauts there by the mid-2030s.
But robotic Mars missions slated for 2016 and 2018 were cut from the president's new budget proposal, even though NASA has spent $64 million on early designs with the European Space Agency for the two missions. The most ambitious Mars flight yet and one the National Academy of Sciences endorsed as the No. 1 solar system priority — a plan to grab Martian rocks and soil and bring them back to Earth — is on indefinite hold.
This exemplifies what I think is the biggest problem with our government space program: Continuity. Presidents scrap old programs--especially those of the other party's President--and too often don't even keep their own promises.
I hate to say it, but it's events like these that make me wonder if the Chinese won't indeed beat us in the Space Race. They, at least can make a plan and stick to it.
So what do we do? My first thought is give NASA a long-term budget for certain programs: This much a year, every year for x years. They have to stay in that budget, but at least they won't get it cut. "Soft" programs (like NASA's education, groundskeeping, etc.) could be on an annual basis, but a project like the Mars missions could just assume X dollars a year until the project ends. Or (since expenses might vary) a planned budget each year, but approved along with the project and with a guarantee of no changes.
This means they'd have to plan pretty well, and it could be a problem if they run into trouble, but let's face it: Most commercial industries, when they dedicate to a project, see it through unless it proves to be a failure. The Mars missions are not failures, yet they are being canceled because of Congressional and Presidential pressure in an election year.
In the meantime, SpaceX has said they hope to get a man on Mars in 10-20 years. Have to say, my money is on them.
What do you think? Is there any other way we can protect long-term space projects from the flightiness of American politics?
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