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RIP Walt Staples

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.

-----
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.

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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.

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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

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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.)
Here's a video I found about one of Romney's space advisers.  It is a campaign video, so keep that in mind, but it brings up some interesting points:


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.

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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]

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Funding long-term space projects

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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A Note from Newt Gingritch about Space

I'd been planning on running some columns about the different candidate's ideas concerning space.  I had already done one about what Newt Gingrich really said.  Now, you can see his follow-up in his own words:

In the past 10 years – since the Columbia tragedy led President Bush to retire the Space Shuttle, we have spent almost $150 billion on NASA and the civilian space program. We have spent additional money on defense aspects of the space program. Yet the United States currently has no way to launch a human being into space, other than buying seats from Russia.

NASA has accomplished some difficult things in its history, but spending $150 billion on the space program without developing a rocket and spacecraft to launch astronauts into space is near the top of the list.

For Americans who lived through the heroic era of early exploration in space and getting to the moon, it is hard to believe that in 2012 we are once again stranded on the Earth's surface.

NASA has reached this point by achieving a perverse breakthrough: the bureaucratization of space. The modern NASA is so risk averse, and so heavily burdened with safety processes, management, political meddling, and institutional inertia that it takes decades for new programs to get off the ground.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. The time from Glenn's Mercury 6 mission in February 1962 to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon in July 1969 was seven years and five months, to the day.

In that period we figured out how to perform frequent launches, keep humans alive in space for weeks, conduct space walks, rendezvous and dock two spacecraft in orbit, travel to the moon, land on it, walk around there, launch back off, and return to Earth. Each of these achievements presented innumerable challenges. Yet from launching one person to landing on the moon took less than seven and a half years.

The Shuttle program lasted 30 years, not counting the decade it was being developed.  And after 30 years, we are reduced to buying seats for American astronauts on a class of Russian spacecraft first launched 45 years ago, in 1967.

Even if rocket scientists and astro-physicists do view time scales a little differently than most people, it would be desirable for the human space program to make some significant advances over the span of their entire careers.

The men and women who went to work at NASA after having been inspired by our bold space achievements during their youth or by dreams of a spacefaring future cannot be satisfied with what our space program has become. The elected officials who direct them should not be either. And the American people should be dissatisfied with both.

The way forward for the U.S. in space should be rooted in our entrepreneurial values and our spirit of adventure. We must open space to the private sector, allowing free citizens take risks--both financial and physical--in pursuit of our aims on this frontier.

The model for rapid progress at low cost can come straight from the history of aviation. In its infancy, aviation advanced by a series of monetary prizes set for particular feats. Starting in 1906, the U.K.'s Daily Mail offered rewards for the first people to achieve various milestones, including a non-stop flight between London and Manchester and flying across the English channel. In the U.S., William Randolph Hearst offered $50,000 in 1910 for the first person to fly from coast to coast in 30 days. Most famously, Raymond Orteig offered a prize of $25,000 in 1919 for the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. It took eight years, but Charles Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize in 1927.

These competitions were far more dangerous than many today might imagine. In the 1927 Dole Air Race from California to Hawaii, only two of more than 15 entrant planes made it to Hawaii. But the pilots took such risks eagerly and freely, and in doing so made enormous strides in advancing and popularizing aviation.

A prize system similar to that of the early 20th century, aimed at enticing private companies to pursue our goals in space, would be a far more effective and exciting approach for the United States, and it would better reflect our values than does a massive bureaucracy incompetently managed by Congress and appointed bureaucrats. 

The privately funded X-Prize Foundation conducted such an experiment in recent years, offering a comparatively small $10 million prize for a two manned suborbital flights in a reusable spacecraft within two weeks. It drew more than two dozen competitors, and the prize was awarded in 2004.

If, instead of spending almost $20 billion each year and getting nothing new in terms of human spaceflight, Congress set aside a large sum for prizes--say 10 percent of NASA's budget, or $18 billion over a decade--we could save hundreds of billions and still get better results. We could dramatically reduce the size of NASA and refocus its mission on breakthroughs in science and technology, rather than developing or operating basic launch vehicles and spacecraft. 

After I discussed the prize concept with Robert Zubrin in the 1990s, he estimated in his book The Case for Mars that if Congress posted “a $20 billion reward to be given to the first private organization to successfully land a crew on Mars and return them to Earth, as well as several prizes of a few billion dollars each for various milestone technical accomplishments along the way,” it would draw numerous competitors. The actual mission, he estimates, could cost as little as $4 billion, leaving the winner with a $16 billion profit and the taxpayers with a system that gets to Mars thereafter for a fraction of NASA's annual budget.

Prizes have several huge advantages, which Zubrin also points out:

  • We don't pay anything unless and until we actually get results--and we never pay more than the prize amount. If no one offers a system of  launch vehicles and spacecraft that meet the prize specifications, it doesn't cost anything. And cost overruns are impossible even if there is a winner. After spending $150 billion on NASA for no current manned capability, this is quite a virtue.
  • It would result in systems radically cheaper than those NASA has produced. NASA contractors are paid on a cost-plus basis, meaning whatever they spend “plus” a markup. This gives them a disincentive to save money. In a prize system, a company has to raise or borrow every dollar a company it spends, and then decreases their ultimate profit.
  • Many competitors will spend money investing in technology and developing new solutions, but won't win the prize. And they spend all the money before the taxpayers ever have to pay anything.
  • Competition breeds better, more diverse results. While NASA projects typically result in only one working design, a single prize incentive could produce several viable designs that make it to the flight stage--each will have different merits.  Awarding runner-up prizes further stokes the competition. 
The golden age of the space program is a piece of our history that makes all Americans feel proud. But today's non-manned interim program discredits that history and disappoints its employees and supporters. It's obvious that the bureaucratic model is failing, and failing expensively. With a prize-based, entrepreneurial approach, we can recapture the spirit of adventure and again be the envy of the world in space.
Your Friend,
q
Newt

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