When it came to colonizing the New World, the governments of Europe had a big role in support, but when it came down to it, it was the commercial businesses and private citizens that ensures a permanent presence. If we're going to have the same kind of success in space, we need to have the same kind of participation, but it seems many people have forgotten that. Thus, let me present three reasons I see why we cannot leave space exploration to the government:
#1 The government has other priorities. Let's face it, the government has gone waaay beyond what the founding fathers intended, and we have a huge deficit and a lot of conflict as a result. What's the government's job in space, then? I'd suggest it's pretty much the same as it is on Earth--protecting the rights and freedoms of its citizens. Step one is establishing a presence in space--a permanent, sustainable presence. Just like with colonization of the New World, that doesn't mean only government employees or government-funded exhibitions, however. It does mean being ready to support even defend its citizens who go fare beyond the Earth. (Sorry, Space is for Peace supporters--I want space to be peaceful, too, but not every nation is going to support that, and if they challenge our presence, we'll need government presence to defend us. And that can be diplomatic as well as military.) However, government role is support of space endeavors and the rights of its citizens in space--not taking on the whole manned space program itself.
#2 Governments are more swayed or stymied by public opinion. Sure, commercial companies need to have a good image, but frankly, as long as they are pleasing their customers, the rest of the world can take their business elsewhere. Governments, unless they're totalitarian and can do what they please, thank you very much, can be swayed by opinions like this one: End Space Exploration Now. And in fact, our government HAS been swayed by opinions like this, which is why the space program has had such rocky fits and starts. Unless space exploration can directly "feed the hungry children" or cut unemployment by several percentages (I don't think they'd be satisfied with anything less) or solve the deficit or whatever the political crisis du jour is, it will not get a gung-ho kind of support we got when first putting a man on the Moon. Without gung-ho support that crosses political parties, we're not going to get a long-lasting coherent government space program.
#3 Governments aren't big on innovation. Yes, I know it's one of NASAs missions to promote new technology, but as a counter, may I present a space shuttle that had to be decommissioned because they couldn't find parts, a bomber fleet in which today's pilots are literally flying their grandfathers' airplanes, a fighter program that might be canceled because Congress won't fund it... Or let's talk cost overruns because of the way the contracting system works in the government. Or maybe how a new administration can kill a program media res and replace it with his own great idea...which may or may not survive the next election.
The fact is, the government isn't interested in profit or product the way a commercial industry has to be. So when it comes to technological programs, they are looking as much at will it make jobs and promote themselves or their party as will it create a product that will get the job done--and then how to create the next one to do it cheaper, easier or more safely. I'm not trying to put down NASA or government contractors like Lockheed Martin, but they are at the mercy of the political system, which really is more conducive to road repair than rocket building.
Government has a role in space exploration. It can do some things commercial industries, especially fledgling ones, can't. However, if we want a real, sustained presence outside the atmosphere, it will take more than the government.
Thoughts on Manned Space #3: Don't Leave it to the Government
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The Dragon's Going to ISS Feb 7!
Hooray! SpaceX has a launch date for the Dragon Feb 7! The NASA Press release is here, but here are the highlights:
* The Dragon will first do a fly-by at about 2 miles away from the station in order to check its sensors and other systems needed for a safe docking.
* When the Dragon docks, the ISS will use its robotic arm to assist. (It doesn't say why that is so. I had thought from the videos that it would dock on its own.)
* SpaceX is, of course, the first commercial craft to dock with the International Space Station, so this is history in the making.
* SpaceX has completed 36 of 40 of the milestones disctated to it under the COTS agreement, for which it will receive a total of 288 million dollars. (To compare, the space shuttle Endeavor cost 1.7 billion dollars.)
Of course, the next step for the Dragon and SpaceX is to finish the modifications that make it manned-approved. SpaceX has suggested that the Dragon is manned capable. However, there are certain modifications, like an escape system, that NASA is requiring. (Not a bad idea considering the Shuttle disasters.)
Forbes Magazine says that in light of the problems that the Russians have been having with their program lately, getting commercial flights going. Considering the latest report on how they were working on Phobos-Grunt, including soldering it while full of highly explosive rocket fuel, I'm even more glad to see us making progress toward domestic services. I had been seeing reports that the Dragon's maiden flight might get pushed off as far as April. I wonder, did the Phobos-Grunt failure (and subsequent revelations) perhaps nudge someone in the bureaucracy to accelerate the schedule?
According to NASA, SpaceX has really put their nose to the grindstone to fix problems NASA pointed out: "SpaceX has made incredible progress over the last several months preparing Dragon for its mission to the space station," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. There's oddly nothing on SpaceX's website about this yet. I wonder if their web guru is on vacation, or if the small company had just been putting its efforts elsewhere. Whichever, congrats to SpaceX and Happy Flynig!
Watching the Space Race: Why All of the Sudden?
by Walt Staples
The Sputnik I and II, Vanguard I, and Explorer I launches all hit around the end of 1957--beginning of 1958. Why? Even at the advanced age of seven, it never occurred to me that this was a nexus in history. At that age, things just happened with little or no rhyme or reason. The only things you could depend on were Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy—everything else was up for grabs. About all a kid could do was enjoy the good parts and try to keep their head down through the bad. I was really only aware that suddenly rockets seemed to be popping out of the woodwork as the Americans and Soviets tried to outdo each other.
The reason for this somewhat unsightly scramble was that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had pledged to join just about every other country in the world in taking part in the International Geophysical Year (IGY), an 18 month period that would encompass research on the Earth sciences. The only two major countries that didn't take part in the IGY were the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Peoples Republic of China (the mainland), who were too busy trying to kill each other at the time to worry about minor matters such as the Earth and what made it tick.
One of the main thrusts of the IGY was research revolving around the polar regions. True to the IGY's roots in the periodic International Polar Year scientific efforts, Antarctica was the scene of intense collaboration involving around 68 scientific organizations. For those of us following from the sidelines through TV, radio, newsreels, newspapers, and magazines such as Life and Look, it was pretty much accepted as a seamless continuation of the Navy's Operation Deep Freeze (the first two, Deep Freeze I and II, 1955-57), the building up of bases, stores, and equipment for the coming studies.
Aside from the two Sputnik orbital launches and the Vanguard misstep, there were 92 successful or attempted suborbital launches in support of the IGY from July 1957 to the end of the year, and, in 1958, 6 successful orbital missions out of 28 tries and 133 successful or attempted suborbital launches. Most of the suborbital launches were small sounding rockets such as the Aerobee and Britain's Skylark (the latter launched from Woomera, in South Australia). It's thought that some of the Soviet launches may have been in support of the IGY, but, as is often the case at that time, things start getting murky once one moves east of the Fulda Gap.
1958 also ushered in a number of failed efforts to launch exploratory probes to the moon. The Americans were ahead of the Soviets in blowing up lunar probes, with their first unsuccessful try at sending Pioneer 0 to the moon in August. The Soviets weren't able to lose their first lunar probe, Luna E-1 1 (NASA designation Luna 1958A), until September. Pioneer 1 and Luna E-1 2 (NASA designation Luna 1958B) were lost the same day, 11 October. The pain continued with Pioneer 2's failure to reach the moon in early November.
For more information: http://www.nationalacademies.org/history/igy/
Space Coolness--LIVE
Today, I present to you some fun space links to see what's happening right now:
See what the International Space Station Sees: Live link at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html
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| Hey! I can see my house from here! |
Remember the Voyager probes? We're still discovering stuff from them! They're in the heliosheath (the outer part of the heliosphere where solar wind is slowed by pressure from interstellar gasses--about 80 times the distance from the sun that the earth is! You can exactly how far they've traveled here: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/index.html
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| Can you hear me now? |
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| No, John Carter is not your tour guide. |
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| Sadly, it didn't let me design this. Sigh. |
Here's you chance to be an astronaut!
Serioiusly! NASA has opened up applications for astronauts. Get the details here: http://astronauts.nasa.gov/.
You have until January 27, so brush up those resume's now.
There's no guarantee that as an astronaut, you'll actually go into space. Instead, you get to go around doing PR work for NASA, along with lots of ground-based work. In fact, do you know what they call astronauts who never get off the Earth?
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| Not a penguin. |
Watching the Space Race: Finally! America Enters the Race with Explorer
by Walt Staples
Finally!
The TV picture was crystal clear—which by today's standards means it was grainy and in living black and white. The thing that caught the eye was the spinning cylinder at the top of the rocket, just below the last stage. That one side was painted white and the other black made it seem to almost blink. Black chevrons running between a pair of black bands encircling the second stage screamed that the launch vehicle was a product of Wernher von Braun's Redstone Arsenal shop (I didn't know it at the time, but the Army did this with their domesticated V2s and later American made rockets that they launched from White Sands so they could study the rockets' roll pattern). The night scene on the TV lit up as flame billowed up around the lower part of the rocket. Rather than tiredly falling over and exploding as in the previous launch attempt of an American satellite, the Army's rocket rose slowly into the dark sky. Explorer I was on it's way. We were in space!
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Explorer's launch was a bright spot in the winter of my family's discontent. The launch occurred near the cusp of 31 December-1 February 1958 (22:48 EST, 31 December and 03:48 GMT, 1 February). At the time, I was safely in bed (when you're seven, you have to put up with such ridiculous hours as a 20:00 bedtime—thank you, WSLS-Channel 10 for the early news on Saturdays). The Wednesday before, my mother and I put my father on a Piedmont DC-3 to Corning, New York. He'd given up trying to make ends meet working for a Roanoke exterminator and Corning Glass was the closest anyone was erecting steel. We'd get to see him for a weekend every three months.
Explorer's launch had an electric effect on Americans. Suddenly, we were in the race. The jokes stopped...mostly, and people were eager to scan the papers for stories about spaceflight. For us kids, Christmas came twice in 1958. As far as we were concerned, the Army was ten feet tall! (The Navy returned to our good graces when Monogram Models' 1/48th scale F4U Corsair appeared on drugstore shelves that spring—you just can't stay mad at a service that flew such a neat airplane.) Proof that America had entered the Space Age came Christmas 1958 when Marx Toys' Cape Canaveral playset pushed aside their Dinosaur Land playset from under the tree.
At the time, everyone knew the Explorer launch vehicle as the “Jupiter-C,” an outgrowth of the Army's Redstone nuclear-capable ballistic missile. To the illuminati, it was actually designated the Juno 1 to distinguish it from the original Jupiter-C which was used in 1956 and 1957 for suborbital flights as a re-entry vehicle testbed.
The Explorer satellite, itself, was shaped like a mini-rocket rather than a ball like its predecessors, weighing in at about 31 pounds (14 kg), and was produced by the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), a truly wonderful place.
One of the things the Army was keeping under its helmet was that the data on cosmic ray strikes they were receiving from Explorer wasn't adding up. Instead of the nice steady rate of comic ray strikes they expected, when the satellite was at about 300 miles (500 km), Explorer received the expected hits; when it rose to 1,250+ miles (2,000+ km), it said there were no hits at all. It wasn't until the launch of Explorer III that a team under Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa tumbled to what was going on—the Earth's magnetic field had a pair of belts of charged particles trapped in space and the detector was swamped at the higher altitude. These belts were christened the “Van Allen Belt” for some reason. (Oh, and Explorer II? It failed to reach orbit when it was launched on 5 March 1958, so we don't like to talk about it.)
A second thing under that helmet was that, supposedly, von Braun and the Army were ordered in 1956 by the White House not to attempt to orbit a satellite. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted the first satellite orbited by a squeaky-clean civilian rocket. After the civilian bird (built by the Naval Research Laboratory) laid an egg, Washington burnt up the phone lines to Huntsville looking to get something—anything--into orbit. And orbit they did.
thoughts on Manned Space #2: Find the Water
Curiosity is on its way, with the mission of analyzing rocks along the Gale crater for signs of organic (carbon-based) compounds. It’s unique in that it’s a change from NASA’s usual Mars missions, which usually sought water or evidence of water.
We’re starting to find lots of evidence of water on other celestial bodies, from Mars to the moons of Jupiter to far-off planets. This is promising if we ever want to reach beyond our own planet, much less the solar system. But just what’s the big deal about water?
Most obviously, we need water in order to survive—to drink, to cook, to wash. It’s both a universal solvent and a catalyst for a lot of chemical reactions, so it’s important for experiments as well as daily living. Water is also useful as rocket fuel—seriously!
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Driven by a need to use a fuel that can be produced on water-bearing planets and pressured by environmentalists, researchers are working to develop a new type of rocket fuel, made of a frozen mixture of water and “nanoscale aluminum” powder with the thickness of 80 nanometers, that could be easily manufactured on the moon, Mars or any other planet having water on it.
The aluminum powder, aka ALICE, can be used to launch the rockets into their orbit, fuel long-distance space missions and generate hydrogen for the fuel cells, says Steven Son, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, who is working with NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Pennsylvania State University to develop ALICE, used earlier this year to launch a 9-foot-tall rocket.
“ALICE might one day replace some liquid or solid propellants, and, when perfected, might have a higher performance than conventional propellants,” said Timothee Pourpoint, a research assistant professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. It’s also extremely safe while frozen because it is difficult to accidentally ignite,” he added.
If you've not seen Rocket City Rednecks, they're worth a watch!
A much longer term concern is removing water from this planet to service life on other planets.I think Douglas Adams summed up the problem best in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
After a while, the style settles down a bit, and it starts telling you things you actually need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion caused by over 10 billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave. So every time you go to the lavatory there, it's vitally important to get a receipt.
The Earth's atmosphere keeps water locked into a continuous system—remember fourth grade science? Other planets with less atmosphere don’t have that. In fact, there’s a theory that part of the reason Mars no longer has surface water is that it all sublimated into space. So we have to be careful, even with the water we find, to make sure we don’t lose it. (Which goes back to the recycling. Don’t think about where the water’s been.)
Naturally, water is also one of the primary indicators of biological life, and while we might not find little green men, we are more likely to find little green microbes and other small life that can live in extreme conditions. (Called Extremophile life, and you can find it on earth, too—even in nuclear waste!) This could be a boon, if we can find and cultivate native food sources, or a bomb, if we come across something dangerous to humans. (Remember the Andromeda Strain? The trailer is hokey, but I saw it again last week while doing research. Still a freaky movie worth watching, even fourty years later!)
So finding indigenous sources of water is another vital step toward establishing a manned presence off the earth. That we have found it is a promising sign. Now, we need to figure out how to best to harvest, protect and use it.
In the meantime, I'm thirsty. Time to get a drink.
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