Offer New ISS Real Estate As Hub For Orbiting Space Commerce

Kirk Shireman, NASA’s deputy International Space Station program manager, said this week that a left over piece of hardware not originally planned for flight could easily be made flight worthy. Called the Node Structural Test Article, it could add five new berthing ports for the station. The possibility of all that new real estate raises some intriguing prospects for expansion of the ISS beyond the confines of the mere outpost it is today to being the hub of an orbiting city in space — a nucleus of space commerce.

I propose that a space port authority be formed through which this new real estate would be managed. NASA has been presented with a remarkable opportunity if its managers are keen to recognize it. One of the few things government can do better than any other organization is to foster new industries. They’re doing it through vehicles such as the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract where commercial entities now vie to develop transportation services to low earth orbit. It’s a new era in which private industry retains the rights to the technology they develop and can thus continue to develop it into an increasingly profitable commercial venture. And what is the major benefit to society of this strategy? The cost of access to space falls dramatically, opening up the final frontier to exponentially-increasing numbers of people seeking new opportunities and prosperity. And in that same spirit, the Agency can use this new real estate aboard the International Space Station to foster industry in earth orbit.

It’s not enough to encourage private enterprise in the building of rockets for reaching orbit. The real reward comes from establishing a permanent presence capable of expansion, and the Node Structural Test Article is the key to that growth.

NASA should offer this new real estate to private industry. With the pittance of government investment and effort it would take to put in place this remaining space station hardware, NASA could boost the commercial sector far more than all the contracts it has so far offered for that purpose, combined!

Tweet This Post 

Citizen Science Projects A New Trend

A new trend has begun to emerged around what is being termed “citizen science” projects in which the general public is invited to participate in serious and ongoing scientific studies within various areas of astronomy. We reported last month (see Lunar Scientists Need You, July 25, 2010 STN) on one such project called Zooniverse. It was started in July, 2007 by the Citizen Science Alliance and now proclaims nearly 313,000 participants. Within the Zooniverse visitors are presented with a suite of projects that allow the average person to track solar storms, help astronomers figure out how galaxies form and evolve by classifying their shape using Hubble images, and in the latest project, Moon Zoo, you can help lunar scientists explore the surface of Earth’s moon by identifying features like craters and lava tubes you find in new images being transmitted from spacecraft now in orbit. But other programs are coming to light that give the science enthusiast an ever widening selection of studies from which to choose.

Two years earlier in 2005, a program called Einstein@Home was launched as a joint effort of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, otherwise known as the Albert Einstein Institute. If you like the idea of participating in serious astrophysics but are less enthusiastic about the hands-on aspect, this program is for you. It works by setting up your personal computer as one in a large series of nodes, which collectively have some serious computing power. It’s called distributed computing, and it makes use of your computer’s idle time to scan through data collected from various astronomical observatories like that from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to search for gravitational waves originally predicted by Albert Einstein, which could indicate the presence of exotic types of stars like pulsars and spinning neutron stars. And the program is turning up discoveries. On August 12, 2010 Science Express reported, “Three citizen scientists – a German and an American couple – have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries.” The press release goes on to say that, “The citizens credited with the discovery are Chris and Helen Colvin, of Ames, Iowa and Daniel Gebhardt, of Universität Mainz, Musikinformatik, Germany. Their computers, along with 500,000 others from around the world, analyze data for Einstein@Home (on average, donors contribute about two computers each).” A new day has dawned in the fundamental sciences when average folks can play such a pivotal role in new discoveries. And Eistein@Home is by no means the only distributed computing project available. According to VolunteeratHome.com there are also projects in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and math.

Another tool has become available to the amateur, and it makes possible new discoveries in Earth sciences right from home, but this time it comes from an unlikely source. On July 22, the journal Science reported the discovery of the Kamil crater in Egypt. What makes the discovery so special is that it was made using Google Earth! Hot on the heels of the first came a second discovery on August 10 and  reported by Wired Science that a crater 6 miles wide was found in the Bayuda desert in Sudan. Now a tool freely available to everyone is being used to locate as yet unknown meteorite impact sites on Earth in what’s being called the new age of “armchair crater hunting.”

Zooniverse, Einstein@Home and other programs are tapping into a powerful resource that has previously gone unnoticed: the populace. Regular folks. And why not? We are a renewable source of energy and enthusiasm. What’s more, we can contribute substantially to the greater body of human knowledge when mechanisms are devised through which we can participate in research.

But what’s next? The way I see it, the public may have a role to play in upcoming robotic exploration of the moon. Though NASA flounders for the moment, seeking direction and purpose, the private sector is moving full steam ahead with the fabrication of machines for roving, digging, sampling and exploring the lunar surface. And these machines, because of the moon’s close proximity to earth, can and will be controlled from command centers on Earth. In the next few years, we may well see instances of the public invited to climb into a virtual presence system and drive a lunar rover across the moon in much the same way that remote operators control robotic submarines and unmanned aerial vehicles. And should the call come, you can bet that yours truly will be signing up.

Tweet This Post 

One More Giant Leap

NASA announced late last week that they are seeking to buy data from commercial providers that, “reduces risks for future human and robotic lander designs by employing these missions as unique demonstration testbeds,” according to their Broad Agency Announcement. Through their Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) program, the agency will award $30.1M to private companies already vying for the Google Lunar X Prize, itself valued at an additional $30M. With this latest incentive, private companies now stand to make over $60M for successfully landing on the moon.

This is great news for lead contender Astrobotic Technology (see The Undiscovered Country, June 23, 2010 STN), a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off company devoted to robotic exploration of the Moon. They’re already well into the hardware testing phase of their lunar rover, set to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 late in 2012 bound for the Apollo 11 landing site. The mission, dubbed “Tranquility Trek^TM,” will place a 160-lb, 5-foot-tall rover on the lunar surface for 10 to 12 days until lunar night fall. When the sun rises two Earth weeks later, the solar-powered robot will re-awaken to resume from its deep freeze hibernation after having experienced temperatures plummeting to -298 degrees Fahrenheit. This will be an important milestone for the technology since their plan is to follow on with additional robots to “prospect for the water ice and other volatiles at the Moon’s poles, which can be transformed into propellant to refuel spacecraft for return flights to Earth, doubling the productivity of human missions,” said Dr. William “Red” Whittaker, Astrobotic founder and director of CMU’s Field Robotics Center. There in the permanently-shadowed craters of the poles, robots must face the most bitter cold yet recorded in the solar system. This first demonstration flight will serve as a practice run for the deep freeze of the poles. And if these robots do well, they can serve as a first generation of a sort of space-based hunting dog to help in those tasks too dangerous for humans.

Still further, in an exclusive statement to SpaceTalkNOW, Dr. Whittaker said that his company also has plans to explore newly-discovered features on the Moon called “skylights,” (see A New Decade and Infinite Possibilities, January 11, 2010 STN; The Undiscovered Country, June 23, 2010 STN; and Lunar Scientists Need You, July 25, 2010 STN). These features are the collapsed ceilings of long-dead lava tubes, and they hold much promise as possible sources of lunar water as well as for natural shelter against the radiation environment.

This new NASA lunar program represents a giant leap forward in fostering lunar-based commerce around which the settlement of our nearest neighbor in space could arise. Like the COTS and CCDev commercial contracts before it, NASA will not use ILDD to take ownership of any flight or ground systems like was done during the Apollo program when the agency took full ownership of the Saturn rocket, Command Module and Lunar Lander and all their supporting technology. When Apollo died, those vehicles — so hard won — died with it. But this time, things are different. It’s a perfect example of NASA playing the role for which it is so well suited: that of macroeconomic enabler. The ILDD program’s money will spur innovation in the complimentary areas of human and robotic space flight, which is then reinvested to advance the state of the art still further. Private enterprise can then follow NASA to the moon and supply much of the agency’s needs for technology, materiel and logistical support. It’s a match made in heaven.

Once set in motion, lunar-based commerce can grow exponentially, making use of the nearly limitless, untapped natural resources to be found there not only for supplying the base there but for providing Earth with minerals such as Platinum (see Moonrush by Dennis Wingo, ISBN-13: 978-1894959100) which, though rare on Earth, is abundant on the Moon and could serve as a highly efficient catalyst for the first generation of hydrogen-powered, fuel cell automobiles.

Once a critical mass in space commerce is reached, it opens the door to the spread of space tourism, first from the short-duration, sub-orbital flights begun by Virgin Galactic to low earth orbit and then to the surface of the moon. The progression could be remarkably fast given the right set of circumstances. Already, Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace has plans for establishing the solar system’s first hotel on another planetary body. This can happen in our lifetime! All that is needed is the wise investment of both public and private funds. Uncle Sam and private industry can make great partners if they work together. Now the question is, do those in charge on either side recognize the potential? The NASA folks at the Constellation office from which ILDD will be funded obviously “get it.” But will Congress and the Administration pull the proverbial rug out from under them?

Tweet This Post 

Results In for Constellation Poll

The results of the SpaceTalkNOW poll regarding Project Constellation are in. To the question “Should NASA’s Project Constellation to return humans to deep space be cancelled?” 84.9 percent of respondents said “no.” By a wide margin the people believe that we should return to the moon and deep space. So it would seem that on this issue, like so many others, the Administration is at odds with the folks.

Tweet This Post 

Space Trivia Contest

For the trivia buffs out there, I present a challenge. I will give away a SpaceTalkNOW t-shirt to the first 10 people who can correctly answer my trivia question.

Which is brighter?

a) a full moon, or

b) two half moons

I’ll also include a mug for those who can go the next step and explain why.

Send your entry to contest@SpaceTalkNOW.org and be sure to include your name.

---

Click here for contest terms

Tweet This Post 

A Simple, Elegant Solution

With the problem of space junk growing at an exponential rate (see Earth Now Has A Ring, July 27, 2010), the search for a solution is becoming ever more urgent. For the past several years ideas ranging from slowing defunct satellites to re-entry speed using low-power laser light to destroying them with space weapons to direct capture using a second satellite have been suggested, but none are viable solutions. Space-based lasers with which to induce the necessary drag forces are not yet technically feasible, because their power sources would be far too bulky and expensive to place into orbit. The thousands of additional fragments that would be generated from destroying a satellite would only make the problem many times worse. And the direct capture method would require years to develop at such a high cost that funding would likely never materialize.

An obvious question to ask is why satellite operators don’t dispose of spacecraft after their missions are complete by simply flying them back into the atmosphere and allowing them to burn up on re-entry. Though many spacecraft posses a propulsion system with which to adjust their positions and altitude periodically over the life of the mission and thus could conceivably be used to re-enter, there are also many that don’t, and there is no mandate to place them on board. It all boils down to cost. If a propulsion system is not absolutely essential to mission success, it will be omitted to minimize weight and thus limit cost, because each pound of mass launched requires additional fuel. Similarly, when propulsion systems are included, the amount of fuel launched with the satellite is limited to no more than is necessary to perform station keeping of the satellite at its intended orbital position.

Kristin Gates of the Global Aerospace Corporation in Altadena, California has come up with a simple and elegant solution. She proposes attaching a balloon 37 meters (approximately 121 feet) in diameter. At that size, gas pressure exerted by the atmosphere on that much surface area would induce significant drag forces, causing the satellite to gradually slow down and re-enter the earth’s atmosphere after little more than a year; that’s compared to centuries without an assist.

The idea goes like this: The balloon is folded, packed and stowed on board the satellite before launch. At a weight of only 36 kilograms (about 79 pounds), the entire package is light enough that its cost impact on the mission is minimal. When the spacecraft reaches the end of its life, the balloon is inflated with helium or some other inert gas. A year later that piece of spent space hardware burns up in the atmosphere.

This method would do well at some of the more congested altitudes below 1500 km (about 932 miles) where there is still enough of an atmosphere to provide the needed drag. For satellites above that altitude such as those at the geosynchronous orbit where many of our communications and weather satellites fly, another solution must be found. There simply is not enough air in that region that would allow the method to work.

Gates and her company are now seeking funding for a demonstration flight. This is where NASA should step in with funds to either fast-track a dedicated satellite demonstrator or place the balloon on an satellite that has already been commissioned as a “payload of opportunity.” No other technology presented to date offers the promise that this simplest of the simple offers, and while we wait for a solution to the problem of space junk, the situation is getting rapidly worse.

Tweet This Post 

Life Out There

A bit of a brouhaha was raised last week when Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at Harvard University, presented Kepler space telescope data at the TEDGlobal conference in the United Kingdom. He stated that the data shows around 140 worlds to be “like Earth.” Many in the media and the general public took him to mean that these planets potentially harbor life.

Let’s set the record straight. Dr. Sasselov was strictly referring to the size of these worlds. Using Kepler data, Sasselov and his team employ something called the transit method of planet detection. That is, they observe the change in the amount of light emanating from the parent star as the planet passes — or transits — in front of it. If you plot that change on a graph, it forms what astrophysicists call a “light curve.” And that curve can tell you, within a certain unavoidable margin or error, the size of the transiting planet. This method could not, however,  tell you about the surface characteristics of the planet, let alone whether life may exist there or not.

What I find very interesting about so many scientists searching for life out in the universe is their predilection for earth-like conditions. For example, you hear many references to the “Goldie Locks” or the “habitable” zone. These terms are meant to describe the area of our own solar system inhabited by the earth: not so far from the sun as to freeze our planet and not so close as to boil; just right. This zone turns out to have been ideal for the formation of life — and here’s the salient point — “as we know it.”

I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw some years ago depicting an astronaut on some far flung planet focused intensely on a rock lying near his feet and proclaiming “no life here” to mission control. Being so intent on the area surrounding his feet, he completely overlooks the 8-foot alien standing right over him.

It’s no intentional bias to which we, as humans, resort when we use earth life as our standard of measure. After all, having never met an alien, we have no other source of reference. Still, one would think that we as a species have reached a level of intellectual maturity that would preclude a preoccupation with our feet. We’d like to regard ourselves in the way the Prince of Denmark describes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god!

The overwhelming likelihood when we finally do encounter extraterrestrial life (note the foregone conclusion) is that it will bear no resemblance to us, whatsoever. Our biology comes as the culmination of a nearly infinite number of random events. Change one of them, and the end product may take a drastically divergent path. And the odds that another form of life that emerged and developed elsewhere in the universe would resemble us are infinitesimally small; essentially zero.

So when we cast a gaze outward towards other planets, we might do well to keep an open mind, to make no assumptions and to take life as we find it and not as we expect it to be. It would be an awful pity to overlook what would surely be one of the most profound discoveries in human history, because we didn’t simply open our eyes and see.

Tweet This Post 

Earth Now Has a Ring

If you’re Sci-Fi fan, you’ve undoubtedly seen more than one movie depicting a habitable planet bearing a striking resemblance to Saturn; the main character looking up to see a large, color set of ring spanning from horizon to horizon. And if you were tempted to scoff at the prospect as being no more than an artifact of a fertile imagination, think again. Though the natural ring systems found in our solar system are observed exclusively around gas giant planets — planets with no solid surface on which to land and a crushing gravitational field — Earth does nonetheless have its own ring system. It’s a artificial ring composed entirely of thousands of satellites, both operational and dead, spent rocket bodies plus many more thousands of space hardware fragments that are the products of accidental collisions with one another, secondary collisions of fragments with fragments and even the intentional shooting down of the Fan Yun 1C spacecraft by China as part of an anti-satellite weapon test in 2007. That one event drastically increased the number of pieces of space junk and made much of low earth orbit a much more dangerous place, the impact of which (pun intended) is felt so much more so now that we have people there aboard the International Space Station, tending the orbital laboratory 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Two nights ago such a piece of debris came uncomfortably close to the space station… again. It’s not the first time, and will certainly not be the last. The event underscores the need for a plan to be put in place to 1) stop placing more junk into orbit and 2) begin to remove that which is already there. The US is in the position to lead the charge, but so far there’s been nothing more than talk while one orbit after another fills up with junk at an exponential rate.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be quite so bad if Earth’s ring could at least treat us to the same color display as Saturn with it’s shimmering reds, greens and blues wrapping around the planet’s equator, but it is not to be. What we have is a belt of hypervelocity junk, which represents an increasing menace to space navigation, itself set to increase as commercial, human space flight begins to come into its own.

There are things the government can do right now to help alleviate some of the threat. As it stands, US policy for retiring a spent weather satellite in the geosynchronous orbit is not to return it to earth once its life is over as it should be but to simply boost it into a higher — so-called super-synchronous — orbit and turn it off. This strategy continues to add to the population of junk; it cannot and should not be maintained in the future. It must change and the sooner, the better.

Even this strategy is not adhered to by all spacecraft operators. SpaceNews reports that, “In 2008 and 2009 alone, four geostationary orbiting satellites — the U.S. EchoStar 2 and the Russian Gorizont 33, Raduga 1-5, Cosmos 2371 and Cosmos 2379 — were all left to expire on the geostationary arc without performing end-of-mission orbit-raising maneuvers. EchoStar 2 failed suddenly in orbit and could not be moved.” Then, of course, there is the occasional errant spacecraft like Galaxy 15, which recently ceased responding to commands from the ground and is now plowing uncontrolled through geosynchronous orbit.

The White House has issued orders to NASA and the DOD to begin researching techniques for the mitigation and removal of space debris, but this could take many years before an effective, affordable strategy of space junk removal is put in force. There are thousands of pieces of junk, and to physically remove each one could cost many millions of dollars per piece. Then again, one can easily see the potential for jobs creation in the endeavor.

In the meantime, policy must change. We must adopt strict rules to prevent spacecraft operators from leaving dead satellites in space. Let’s not wait until the multi-billion-dollar International Space Station is crippled or destroyed before we become proactive.

Tweet This Post 

Lunar Scientists Need You

Have you ever daydreamed of exploring space? Ever found yourself wandering off on an imaginary expedition of discovery across some vast, alien landscape? Of course, the regular guy and gal could never hope to make such a journey in person. That’s really only Hollywood stuff. Right? Wrong. In fact, you now have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts and be the next human to look across the moonscape and discover some of its many secrets as part of a serious and ongoing scientific program.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched on June 18, 2009, and since it arrived in orbit around the moon has been taking the highest resolution images of its surface in existence. Data is coming in from the spacecraft at such a phenomenal rate that scientists have difficulty sifting through it all, so they’ve asked for the help of folks just like you to help them identify high-value targets for further scientific study. And for this citizen science project they’ve set up a website where you can go to take part. After viewing videos and other help that will show you how to recognize features, you’ll peruse through images of the moon’s surface few others — if any — have seen, even among planetary scientists. In the process of becoming a lunar researcher, you will learn more about the surface or our nearest neighbor in space than you ever have before and perhaps discover something as yet unknown. It’s a voyage of discovery seldom available to those outside astrophysics.

Go to MoonZoo.org and register. From there, you’ll have tools at your disposal that allow you to mark interesting features like the more recent craters that have excavated light-colored material in an ejecta blanket all around the impact site. They call these fresh white craters, and the science team will count the number that you identify so they can calculate the current impact rate. The information you provide with help them to assess the risk to earth of asteroid strikes.

You may also discover elongated pits. These are areas where a subsurface lava tube has collapsed in on itself. Another, similar feature called a “skylight” has been discovered recently in which only a section of a lava tube’s ceiling has collapsed to reveal a cavernous expanse within. These features have scientists and lunar base planners alike excited. Such areas could serve humans as a natural shelter from the radiation environment. They may also be sources of water, trapping it in frozen form in their permanently dark recesses. In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), more popularly known as the concept of “living off the land,” is an important strategy for maintaining a permanent human presence on the moon. If we can obtain shelter from natural features and extract from them some of the resources and consumables we need, the cost of the venture is dramatically reduced. I becomes obtainable within our lifetimes. It becomes attainable by you!

Spacefaring nations have been launching probes and landers to the surface of the moon for decades. You may also run across the technology they left behind. When you find these pieces of space mission hardware, the positions that you mark will be used to build up a database that can be made available to the worldwide science community and used as positional landmarks for lunar cartographic mapping.

These and other features — many of which could only be described as just plain weird — are yours to discover. You’ll have a great deal of fun and adventure, and you can share what you find through the built-in Moon Zoo blog. And perhaps you’ll discover something that no one else has ever seen. If you have the heart of an explorer, this site is definitely for you.

Moon Zoo belongs to a larger community of citizen science projects called the Zooniverse. There you’ll also find Galaxy Zoo Hubble where you can help astronomers figure out how galaxies form and evolve by classifying their shape using Hubble images. There’s Solar Stormwatch where you can help spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Then there’s Galaxy Zoo Mergers and Galaxy Zoo Supernovae. But if you’re interested in helping build a knowledge base of our moon, and in so doing help usher in the age of lunar settlement, Moon Zoo is your best bet.

So log on and plug in to a universe of discovery. You can make a difference, and you’ll satisfy that innate urge to explore that we all have. And maybe, just maybe, the day when you can board a rocket bound for a moon base to see the sights in person will get even closer.

Tweet This Post 

Space Commerce

For nearly half a century now we’ve heard from the futurists what our lives will be like just around the corner. The picture they paint is one with human settlements circling the earth and sprawling across the surface of the moon; of space hotels spinning like pinwheels through black skies; of rocket flights as common as airplane flights are today; and most importantly of a swelling population of off-world settlers pursuing the limitless prosperity that this new frontier of space has to offer. It’s a picture that can be transmuted from the water color and canvas of our imagination to those more vibrant colors of real life.

The technology exists with which to make the dream a reality, so why does it still seem so far away? A naive over reliance on government.

The headline in this week’s print version of Space News reads Effective Cost-Control Strategies Remain Elusive, NASA Officials Say. Space travel — particularly on a large scale — requires the kind of financial agility not found in any bureaucracy. Only the private sector can deliver cost-effective space technology, and then only if there exists a sustaining market. For space commerce to emerge as a self-sustaining enterprise, it cannot be reliant upon the government for its survival. We find ourselves at a nexus in history where, like the time leading up to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, a market is logically assumed to exist but, it has yet to be proven, leaving many holding the really big purse strings with some angst. There is certainly plentiful capital with which to launch space commerce into its own, but most investors remain diffident, choosing to wait and see how investors like Elon Musk of SpaceX, Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace fair. These men have put up their own fortunes to prove that the final frontier is a place of opportunity for all brave enough to go there. When their risks prove successful, others will follow. In the mean time, what is required is a few more like Durant and the Union Pacific Railroad.

At the opening of the week-long Farnborough Air Show in England yesterday, Robert Bigelow in partnership with Boeing announced the intent to build and launch into earth orbit a commercial space station by 2014 — an imminently achievable goal based on Bigelow’s flight-proven, inflatable space habitat design. Should this enterprise come to fruition, it would represent a huge boost to commercial, human space flight by offering a destination open to a throng of paying customers. It would serve as both hub and incubator for orbiting commerce and a place from which that traffic could spread to the moon and beyond. Speaking for Boeing’s space exploration division, former astronaut, Vice President and General Manager Brewster Shaw said, “We need the funding. The money that NASA has proposed closes the business case. Without that, we would have a difficult time.” That was yesterday. Today it was reported in Space News that the newly-passed House of Representatives version of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 cuts in half the $500M CCDev contract funds, a share of which they had hoped to capture for the venture.

This is typical of government wrangling over money, all the more limited by unchecked growth in entitlement spending, which will never boost productivity in any area of the country one iota. Obama wanted to kill the Constellation moon program, outright. Congress, however, has passed a measure that would keep but restructure Constellation, retaining only the heavy lift rocket used to get into earth orbit and the crew transportation vehicle  for transport out of orbit. The moon as a destination and the systems needed to land and establish a base there are sadly, but for the moment, set aside. And the money private companies were hoping to gain for human space flight would now seem much harder to obtain, but there is another way.

The private sector knows only too well the blind spot that exists 2 feet beyond the end of the bureaucrat’s nose. And the changes in course that come with every administration only further exacerbate the problem of getting a coherent, manageable and affordable civil space program. They know that the only hope of getting humans into space en masse rests with a sustained strategy carried out over a decade or more. And this will never come out of Washington.

What is required is more investment from the private sector. More investors ready to face a big risk for an even bigger payoff will need to step up. Burt Rutan has shown the way. He’s demonstrated that commercial, human space flight can be profitable when he designed and built SpaceShipOne. Within the space of a couple of years he transformed his SpaceShip from a concept into a paying contract. Virgin Galactic has purchased a fleet of 5 vehicles, which are set to become the world’s first spaceline when the flight test program is complete some time over the next 18 months. And if you’re one of the naysayers who contend that Rutan’s design is not proven, consider this: VMS Eve, the first production model of SpaceShipTwo, is a scaled up version of SpaceShipOne that won the X Prize.

The emergence of space commerce will foster even more growth of investment and technology and set the stage for off-world settlement. And such a tenuous and fragile construct can only be born near earth where it can be nurtured into health. This is why so many have argued in favor of going back to the moon and establishing a permanent presence there before going on to Mars. The latter requires massive government research and development programs, which have proven time and again to evaporate into a mist of apathy and bureaucratic self interest. If government has not been able to go back to the moon in 40 years then why should we believe that have the ability will suddenly appear now?

Set aside for the moment the government’s demonstrative inability to focus or to formulate a coherent strategy for getting humans into space on any meaningful scale. There is another term to this equation that, in and of itself, is reason enough for them to work against the settlement of space. Our government believes that space travel is just too dangerous for the public. Yes, there are those among us too fragile for the venture, but America was settled by a hearty breed of human, both physically and mentally, and we still have that pioneering spirit in our blood. When it at last lights upon our collective consciousness that space travel is no longer science fiction but science fact, and that all that stands between us and adventure beyond our wildest dreams is the decision to go, what a spectacle it will be.

Tweet This Post 

Constellation and Commercial Crew Not Mutually Exclusive

Lawmakers introduced the “Protecting Human Space Flight Act of 2010″ yesterday with the aim of forcing NASA to spend 90 percent of the program’s remaining funds in the last quarter of this fiscal year. Let’s all hope that they succeed.

If you find that puzzling coming from a commentator touting commercial, human space flight, remember this: Constellation is, and always has been, about going back to the moon – so much more so following the earth-shaking discoveries made in just the last several months (see A New Decade and Infinite Possibilities, January 11, 2010 STN). Most of the pundits have reduced the argument to an either-or proposition: a) go back to the moon, or b) fund the private sector to create a commercial transport system to low earth orbit. I assure you, there is an option c.

Yes, private enterprise can and should be funded for the creation of a commercial transport to LEO. And yes, Constellation should go forward, albeit without Ares (see Constellation Plan-B A Good Idea, March 5, 2010 STN). But funding one to the exclusion of the other makes no sense. The inspiration and purpose behind transporting humans to the International Space Station and all other points in earth orbit is to create an environment economically conducive for building an orbiting infrastructure, itself capable of supporting transportation to the moon and eventually Mars. Building a inexpensive transport system while canceling Constellation is about as useful as building an elevator to nowhere. Conversely, moving forward with Constellation and spending a needless amount of its budget reinventing booster rockets when the private sector can do it at a fraction of the cost is equally ridiculous. Such an expenditure could undercut other systems like the Altair lunar lander to the point where they are ultimately unachievable. Again, the whole point is going back to the moon. To put it in perspective, if you’re goal is to drive across country, your limited funds are better spent on a good set of tires. How much sense, then, would it make to spend your entire vacation budget on inventing and manufacturing your own wiper blades, leaving no money for the tires… any tires? The bottom line is that going back to the moon and creating a commercial crew transport capability are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the one compliments the other.

How is it that these simple but conspicuous principles completely escape the grasp of our President and the Administrator of NASA? Perhaps it’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom. And perhaps the administration also suffers from a case of Not Invented Here. As for the commercial folks backing the cancelation of Constellation, I’m less critical. Before the President’s proposed 2011 budget was announced, they were facing rigid, myopic forces bent on shutting them out. Still, parties on both sides should be concentrating more on what’s best for the country. It’s called balance, and when it’s observed, everyone wins.

Tweet This Post 

The Undiscovered Country

What we know today of the moon’s fundamental nature is light years ahead of what it was only a year ago, thanks to a spacecraft named LCROSS, or Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite. It’s mission was to look for evidence of water by slamming a large mass into a permanently shadowed crater at the lunar south pole then directly sample the impact plume by flying through it. A painstakingly meticulous post-impact examination of the telemetry revealed that they had indeed found what they were looking for. Over night, the cries of “bombing the moon” and “mission failure” were replaced with the infinitely more rational realization that we were witnessing one of those moments in history when knowledge takes a huge leap forward. Scientists, engineers and just plain enthusiasts of the moon immediately recognized the discovery as a “game changer,” because in one fell swoop, it meant that the cost of establishing and maintaining a human presence there, be it an outpost or a colony, was profoundly reduced.

NASA’s Project Constellation to permanently return humans to the moon would seem to have gotten a shot in the arm from the revelation that it would no longer need to transport tens of tons of water from earth at enormous cost in fuel. Water for drinking, mixing with lunar-derived concrete with which to build shelters, deriving oxygen for breathing and a myriad other necessities for the wet substance can now be extracted on site. But before the ink is even dry on the scientific papers that proclaim this most fantastic of discoveries, the political powers that be, in their most boundless wisdom, propose to scrap the entire program.

The debate over the fate of the moon program is still building, and it remains to be seen where it all leads. A defiant Congress intent on saving Constellation has dug in its heels, only last week demanding that NASA produce all documents used in reaching its decision to end the program. But whether the politicians succumb to the Not Invented Here syndrome (remember, Constellation was the Vision of another president), the fact that we now know the moon to be immanently obtainable as a destination and a new source of natural resources, wealth and prosperity remains.

So where do we go from here? As I see it, there are two courses for returning to the moon possible within the current environment.

Course 1: Constellation is saved, but is redefined and reworked. The expensive Ares rocket for transporting civil service and commercial astronauts to low earth orbit is deemed unsustainable and ended in favor of privately-developed rockets. Though it could survive from a purely technical standpoint, it is unlikely Ares could ever reach a flight rate that would make it economically viable. Leave that mission to the private sector, who despite all the hype to the contrary, are quite capable of fulfilling that role and are well on their way to proving their own designs and vehicles for both cargo and human transport.

The Orion capsule for transporting astronauts between earth, the moon and other deep space destinations and for returning them to earth, deserves further scrutiny. The private sector may be able to build and fly it – or a similar, capsule-based design – at far less expense than NASA. But either way, we need a vehicle with its capabilities, and unlike Ares, there is no vehicle currently in the private sector pipeline that can take on the mission of Orion.

Finally, the third – and to my mind most important – vehicle component to Constellation is Altair, which will take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface. This part of the program, if no other, must continue. It is the heart and soul of Constellation. We must have a vehicle capable of transporting crew and cargo to the lunar surface, even if ultimately they become two roles slated for two, different vehicles. The same development program could produce both.

Course 2: Constellation and the billions already spent on it are added to the ash heap of NASA programs started in good faith throughout its history only to be scrapped later by political forces. In this case, it falls to the private sector to completely design and fund the venture.

Investors like Elon Musk of SpaceX, Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace and Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic are pumping tens of millions into private space ventures, but the overall number of investors is still insufficient to take on a program as massive as the settlement of the moon. But history has shown us that competition serves as a powerful mechanism through which this shortfall may be addressed. Take for example airline transportation. In the early part of the 20th century, there was neither enough pilots and airplanes nor was there the operations know-how to profit from transporting passengers, so the Orteig Prize was offered to jump start an industry that was as yet only the stuff of dreams. It was that $25,000 prize that spurred Charles Lindbergh to make his now famous flight from New York to Paris in May of 1927, forever altering the course or aviation history.

Fast forward to the latter part of that century when a visionary named Peter Diamandis realized that the time had come to offer up a prize for jump starting yet another industry that existed only in the minds of a few dreamers. It was called the X Prize, and it offered $10M to the first team to fly into space twice within two weeks and do it without any government money. Again, it was a prize that offered the best hope of encouraging research and development for

By 2003 when the competition was in full swing, it was anybody’s guess which of the 26 competitors would win, but I knew it would be Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites. No, I didn’t have a crystal ball and I’m not clairvoyant. Neither were necessary for picking the winner, because even a cursory assessment of the contenders revealed one very telling fact: that Scaled was the only group building and testing hardware. The remainder fielded nothing more than impressive, computer-generated pictures of concepts but not one, tangible thing on which you could place your hands; just so much vapor ware.

So today when I look to pick the winner of the newest X Prize offering $30M to the first team to place a robot on the moon, drive it 500 meters over the lunar surface and send back pictures, I once again look for who’s building and testing hardware. After all, computer models, no matter how impressive, can’t move a single inch much less fly to the moon and drive over it’s surface.

The Astrobotics team is one of the 21 teams now registered in the competition. Led by Dr. William “Red” Whittaker of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, they bring to bear an impressive knowledge base and practical experience gained from building robots to carry out missions too dangerous for humans on earth. There were Dante I and II deployed to the interior of volcanoes in Alaska and Antarctica as well as Pioneer, which went to the Sarcophagus at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor following the disaster in 1999. This team already has an impressive track record and a man at the helm with a practical, business approach to tackling new challenges.

Now the team is building Red Rover prototype robots designed to take on the harsh environment of the moon, which presents them with a few challenges not faced by the famous Mars rovers, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity.

To begin with, lunar regolith, or dirt, is quite different from its counterpart on earth, because the geological processes it undergoes are so different. On earth, soil is exposed to constant weathering, which acts something like a tumbler, rounding off the edges of the individual grains. On the moon, however, this process is absent, so the grains resemble tiny shards of glass. And these shards are very abrasive to technology like robots and their inner workings, even more so than Martian regolith. And that’s to say nothing of the deleterious effects on human lungs.

Then there are the extremely cold temperatures to be found on the moon and the long periods over which those temperatures must be endured. Unlike the Earth and Mars, which have days and nights measured in hours, a single lunar night lasts for two earth weeks. During those two weeks, temperatures at the surface drop to minus 173 degrees Celsius (minus 279 degrees fahrenheit). That’s a long, deep freeze. Still worse are the temperatures found within the polar craters. Within the Cabeus crater at the south pole where water was discovered, temperatures plummet to an almost unimaginable minus 370 degrees fahrenheit! We’ve only recently learned that permanently shadowed areas such as Cabeus are the coldest places yet detected in our solar system.

The moon presents challenges, but Astrobotics has faced serious challenges before, and they have very interesting ideas on how to win the Google Lunar X Prize. The plan is to launch their robot late in 2012 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 heavy lifter. Red Rover will land on the lunar surface attached to its Artemis lander, and once there, they’ll set about meeting the objectives of the competition, which are to drive roughly about three tenths of a mile or roughly twice the distance Wilbur Wright flew he and his brother’s airplane during their first powered flights in December 1903. They’ll also send back video, but instead of grainy images likes those sent back to earth by Apollo 11, we’ll be seeing the surface of the moon in high-resolution 3-D!

Their expedition to capture the Google Lunar X Prize will not be a flash in the pan. Already they are drawing up plans for follow-on missions where the intent is to go after what I would call “targets of opportunity.” The opportunity was provided by yet another recent and unexpected discovery, this one made by the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya launched to the moon in 2007. By the end of 2009, it was discovered that images it had taken over the Marius Hills region on the earth-facing side revealed a curious feature, the existence of which lunar scientist have long suspected but until now had not been directly imaged.

The feature is called a “skylight.” Billions of years ago when vulcanism was active on the moon, lava flowed through tubes, some of which ran near the surface. Today, with that activity long dead, and where the roof of such a tube has collapsed, it forms an opening called a skylight. The Marius Hills Hole, as it has come to be called, presents a gaping maw of some 60 meters (197 feet) – big enough to swallow several houses. And within its recesses may lie still more water trapped by the same process that caused it to collect in the polar craters. We’ve known that there are places of permanent shadow in craters at the poles. There, where the light of day can never reach, temperatures plummet to roughly minus 370 degrees fahrenheit. In such frigid conditions, water becomes trapped. It stands to reason that within the darkness of the Marius Hills Hole, there too we will find water as well as a natural shelter against a harsh space environment.

The logic is not lost on the Astrobotics team. “Yes, [the] skylight is an Astrobotics destination, and it is an early option, since that has advantages of being equatorial, favorable lat[itude] and lon[gitude] and for comm[unication], passive, and interesting to exploration,” says Dr. Whittaker. He realizes that the, “real payoffs of dwelling in or on a skylight wall will be protection from radiation, meteorite strike and extreme thermal gradients.” And though robots should never supplant humans for explorations, they can and should be our hunting dogs, at our sides every step of the way. These Astrobotics ‘hunters’ already have a well established pedigree, which places them at the head of the pack when it comes to taking on the tough terrain in and around these skylights. Dr. Whittaker points out that they are, “experienced practitioners of robot repelling.” And though the intent of the Google Lunar X Prize is not to take on this kind of exploration, follow-on missions are in the planning stages that will.

Though Red Rover will enjoy a degree of on-board autonomy, the bulk of their operations will make use of supervised teleoperation. From their command center on earth, an operator will direct the movements of the rover, driving it from place to place, or as Dr. Whittaker puts it, “safeguard and waypoint driving with visualization, oversight and intervention (when necessary) by human[s].” This is possible, because the moon is so close. The time it takes for 3-D video provided by onboard vision sensors to be beamed from the robot resting on the surface of the moon to the operator on earth and then for that operator to respond with control inputs that are then beamed back to the robot is short enough to allow real time operation: about 6 seconds for turnaround, not including the operator’s human response time. This was not possible with the Mars rovers. The time it takes for the signal to travel just one way from the red planet is roughly 18 minutes. That means that if either Spirit or Opportunity were to have approached a hazard, it would require – at a minimum – 36 minutes for that hazard to be conveyed to an earth-based operator and then commands to arrive back in time to save the rover; a design concept that would have presented far too much risk. In their case, what was required was a design that incorporated a great deal of autonomy and at a vast increase in expense over a moon rover needing only modest onboard autonomy.

But for any of this to work, there must be a reliable power source for running onboard systems, keeping them cool when exposed to sunlight and warm when exposed to darkness. And for this, there are two options. The first is called a radioisotope thermal generator, or RTG. This device has been used very successfully for decades on deep space missions where there is too little sunlight for generating electricity from solar cells. This ingenious design works, because of something called the thermoelectric effect. When two, dissimilar metal plates are brought very close together and a large temperature difference is applied between them, something very curious begins to happen. Electricity flows from one plate to the other. It’s very easy to chill one plate, because space itself is very cold. But what about the hot side? That’s where the “radioisotope” part of “RTG” comes in. A small pellet of plutonium provides all the heat necessary and is, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited supply. Spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 launched back in the 1970‘s and that have now left our solar system for interstellar space, are still provided with plenty of power by their RTGs even after three and a half decades of sustained space flight. Sadly, however, there is so much of a stigma attached to the “P” word that most missions opt not to use it unless there is no alternative. RTGs have been blown up, dropped from great heights, and suffered every conceivable type of destructive testing and in each case, passed. Still, the stigma remains, which brings us to option number two: solar cells.

The moon basks in the same, plentiful sunlight that we enjoy here on earth. But remember there are its two-week nights. And if you’re still trying to wrap your brain around that one, picture the moon as it orbits earth. It takes 28 days to complete just one of those rotations and with one side always facing the earth. It spends half that journey in darkness.

Having chosen solar cells as their power source, Astrobotics faces engineering challenges that must be overcome to use them. For the Google Lunar X Prize, it will not be necessary to survive longer than the short time it takes to complete their objectives. But successors will need to survive for extended periods. Those surface robots must bear freezing temperatures never faced by any of their predecessors and continue to function and make discoveries. And true to form, Dr. Whittaker and his team have come up with an answer: night hibernation.

“We’ve demonstrated recovery of key components like battery, computing, memory and some sensors.  Our motor controllers are likely to succeed [and] our next step is to combine these into a system mockup, then to recover and operate that after sequential cryo-freezing.” The robot will land near the dawn, making use of as much of the 14 days of light as possible, and when nights comes, it will role to a stop and hunker down. Already the team has made progress with cold tolerance. Their Scarab Drillbot concept is designed for ice exploration.

One other area in which robotic precursor missions to the moon will need to concentrate is something called In-Situ Resource Utilization. The more familiar term is “living off the land.” Every pound of material brought up from earth costs money in fuel spent to transport it there, so the more material that can be extracted from the surrounding lunar environment, the less it will cost for us to live there. Here again, the Astrobotics team has been thinking ahead, stating that, “ISRU is strategic for Astrobotic and CMU.” Perhaps they could begin with something like making a single ice cube from water extracted from the Marius Hills Hole. It sounds so simple, but it will represent a monumental achievement.

In his recent novel titled Platinum Moon, Bill White shows us a world where NASA has abandoned the moon and it’s left to private enterprise to return mankind to its surface to stay. The plot sounds eerily like what we’re seeing play out in the headlines today. But whether we go back to the moon under a national flag, flying the colors of commercial logos or a bit of both, it will happen. It must happen. Without the hardship and difficulties, the failures and the triumphs of new frontiers to conquer, a society falls into stagnation. Such will be our fate if we fail to express our innate need to explore and to embrace the undiscovered country – the eighth continent, if you will – that hangs right above our heads.

Tweet This Post 

We’ve Missed The Point

Imagine if you will a scenario in which the powers that be announce that beginning next year, all airline flights will be cancelled. In their place, emphasis will shift to various, commercial entities for geting passengers from the parking lot to the terminal.

Hearing such a thing, you’d probably – and rightly – walk away scratching your head and conclude that those same powers lack a fundamental understanding of airlines and what they do. Of course, this is a silly notion and nothing more than a rather odd mental exercise. Right? Well, not really.

Time and time again since the Administration announced it’s desire to cancel NASA’s Constellation program for returning humans to the moon, we’ve heard the argument framed along various permutations of this statement: the Obama administration intends on cancelling Constellation and instead focus on the commercial sector for getting astronauts to the International Space Station.

Huh?

All variations of that statement leave the listener wondering whether the Administration understands why Constellation exists and what it seeks to accomplish. The focus of the program is not getting people to low earth orbit. The function of the program is getting people into deep space – and more precisely, the moon!

The issue of transport to low earth orbit has become the prime focus for the debate over the future of Constellation. In short, rockets – sometimes called “boosters.” But once they’ve reach orbit, their job is done. Going any place else — which is presumable the whole point of having a human space program — requires altogether different vehicles. So when we fail to address the issues of deep space transport and landing craft, we’re completely missing the point. It is these vehicles, which are the real idea behind Constellation, and they are called Orion and Altair. Together, they are the most important components of the program. Take away either — but particularly Altair —  and NASA is reduced to a multi-billion-dollar taxi service, destined only to watch others reach and settle the moon.

Forget Ares! Let’s talk about Altair.

Tweet This Post 

Constellation Plan-B A Good Idea

When the Administration announced it’s proposal to scrap NASA’s Constellation project, it touched off an explosion of opposition including a bipartisan letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden asking him to cease and desist in his actions to begin dismantling the program before the issue can be addressed — and voted upon — by the Congress. The American people have invested billions already in the program, and any unilateral action to end it is not only improper but unlawful. And many believe that to end Constellation completely will effectively end US leadership in space.

Now the rank and file within NASA are speaking up. In an effort lead by former astronaut and now Director of Johnson Space Center Michael Coats, NASA will be considering a Plan-B, and in his first show of independence since taking over as chief of the agency, Administrator Bolden is backing Coats’ play. He has instructed all NASA center directors to begin exploring “what a potential compromise might look like.”

The plan will be a stunningly rational effort to realign the goals of Constellation so that commercial, human space flight can assume the long-overdue role of transporting cargo and people to low earth orbit while leaving US leadership on the frontier of space intact. No other program typifies American leadership in space better than Constellation, but to be sure, some change is necessary.

There are three major aspects to Constellation. The first is a program to design and build two new rockets, Ares 1 and Ares 5; the former a booster to carry  people to low earth orbit and the International Space Station, and the latter a so-called “heavy lift” variant that could carry large payloads including a spacecraft for transporting astronauts from earth orbit to the moon and beyond. And though Ares 1 has already flown and shows much promise to become a capable system, it’s a sad reality that both it and it’s big brother are simply too expensive. Neither could reach a flight rate that could offset the cost of development or to offer the country the frequent and affordable access to space that is needed. Private industry has matured its commercial systems to a point where they can offer transport services at a fraction of that cost of Ares. But more than that, the building of rockets no longer falls within NASA’s bailiwick. The agency was formed to be a research organization, not a manufacturer. It simply makes no sense to have the agency continue in that role. It would be akin to asking the FAA to build airliners. Just try to imagine the price of airfare were that to be the case.

It’s likely that there is going to be a tug-of-war between the two sides of the debate over Constellation. One side wants to keep all the large pieces of the program intact, while the other argues to scrap it completely. It’s yet to be seen how this will play out, but in all likelihood, Ares will go down in history as another good program that didn’t survive the budget axe. There’s a very bright side to this story, however, in that the commercial sector now has the opportunity to accomplish what no government program has: to dramatically reduce the cost of access to space, and in doing so, open up the frontier to the rest of us. There are opportunities to be had and fortunes to be made for those of us with the pioneering spirit. And along the way, all of us stand to gain from the natural resources space and other planets have to offer but that only private enterprise can afford to go after.

The next big piece of Constellation is Orion. Sometimes described as a scaled up version of the Apollo capsule that first took men to the moon in the 1960’s, this spacecraft represents a big leap ahead of its predecessor. Yet this program has had to reinvent certain technologies lost when Apollo was canceled in the early 1970’s. For example, ablative shielding was first invented in the early days of manned flight to keep spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere from burning up by carrying away heat with the layers of its surface literally blasted away during descent. The loss of this and other technologies as a result of our abandonment of the lunar program in favor of a space plane never capable of going beyond low earth orbit stands as the biggest mistake NASA has ever made. Apollo represented not only an enormous investment of the country’s treasure but in the dreams of its citizens to continue to push back the boundary between what is possible and what is only imagined. Orion, or more accurately to say it’s mission as a transporter of humans between planets, may be fertile ground for the commercial sector as well. Already a company called SpaceX has developed a capsule for moving cargo to, and waste from, the International Space Station, but it was designed from the beginning to carry humans as well. Other companies are ready and capable of doing the same. The time is ripe for them to step up to the plate.

And finally there’s Altair. Able to transport astronauts to the surface of the moon, this spacecraft embodies the dream from which Constellation was born: to return humans to deep space. And it is upon this vehicle that NASA should, above all else, focus its resources and funding. This is where there is real research to be done, and this is where the agency can continue in another role to which it is ably suited: that of macro-economic enabler. Around this vehicle and its destination will arise the first space-based economy. Private enterprise will follow NASA to the moon, providing all manner of logistical support including everything from food to communication services. Along the way, the technologies transferred to that sector will enjoy a ceaseless process of improvement and cost reductions.

So here we are at a another crossroads. There is a critical choice to be made, and we had better get it right. This debate surrounds the continuation of our deep space program, not whether private enterprise should participate in manned space flight as so many of the so-called pundits have put it. Private enterprise will ascend. That much is a foregone conclusion. The wheels of progress cannot be stopped. But at the same time, we must not abandon the moon as we did 4 decades ago, lest those same wheels roll over us. Russia, China and yes, even India are poised to take up the challenge of building the first lunar settlement. The miraculous discovery of water there late last year is not lost on them, neither is the presence of abundant natural resources such as platinum for building hydrogen fuel cells for our next generation of automobiles or helium-3 for providing clean, renewable energy for an ever-increasingly energy-hungry world. And these are only two among many.

Pursuing a plan-b for keeping but restructuring Constellation is a good idea: one worthy of our best efforts. Canceling the program outright amounts to throwing out the baby with the bath water. The Administration is attempting to sell the idea that pouring funds and effort into the production of a heavy-lift rocket without interplanetary vehicles will, somehow, miraculously translate into a human presence in deep space down the road, but this is only so much vapor ware. It doesn’t add up, let alone provide any focus. Without Orion (or a commercial version) and Altair for transporting people into deep space then landing them on another world, we’re left stranded in low earth orbit again. The Apollo program teaches us what happens when you lose momentum. We’ve spent four decades playing catch up for that mistake. Let’s not make it again.

Tweet This Post 

Astronautics Giant Speaks Out

Astronautics giant Burt Rutan, whose name entered the household lexicon in the 80’s for designing and building Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling and most recently for the revolutionary SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo, the first, private spacecraft, has made a statement regarding what he feels was a misrepresentation by the Wall Street Journal of comments he made concerning the fate of NASA’s Constellation program. Constellation is the agency’s program to return humans to the moon and go beyond. But the President has proposed in his FY2011 budget to cancel it.

Here is Dr. Rutan’s statement followed by his letter to Congressman Wolf.

__________________________

Since the WSJ chose to cherry-pick and miss-quote my comments to Cong Wolf and since the blogs have taken that to further mischaracterized my comments, I am forwarding the Wolf memo in its entirety, in the hopes that some of this gets corrected. Some additional clarification of my thoughts follow:

My basic concern is that the real value of NASA’s contributions that America realized in the 60s and early 70s is now being completely discarded. How can we rationalize a surrender of our preeminence in human spaceflight? In my mind, the important NASA accomplishments are twofold: 1) The technical breakthroughs achieved by basic research (not by Development programs like Constellation) and 2) The Forefront Manned Exploration that provided the inspiration for our youth to plan careers in engineering/science and that established the U.S. as the world leader in technology.

In short, it is a good idea indeed for the commercial community to compete to re-supply the ISS and to bring about space access for the public to enjoy. I applaud the efforts of SpaceX, Virgin and Orbital in that regard and feel these activities should have been done at least two decades ago. However, I do not see the commercial companies taking Americans to Mars or to the moons of Saturn within my lifetime and I doubt if they will take the true Research risks (technical and financial) to fly new concepts that have low confidence of return on investment. Even NASA, regarded as our prime Research agency has not recently shown a willingness to fly true Research concepts.

For years I have stated that a NASA return-to-moon effort must include true Research content, i.e. testing new concepts needed to enable forefront Exploration beyond the moon. The current Ares/Orion does not do that. While I have been critical of Constellation for that reason, I do not think that NASA should ‘give up’ on manned spaceflight, just that they should be doing it while meeting the 1) or 2) criteria above.

Some have guessed that my recent comments are based on my overall displeasure with the Obama Administration. they are not; however it does seem that the best technical minds in U.S. industry are still striving to find HOW America can continue to be “exceptional”, while the Administration does not want America to BE “exceptional”.

Burt Rutan

__________________________

And now in its entirety, here is the letter from Dr. Rutan to Congressman Wolf.

Thomas M. Culligan
Congressional Appropriations Legislative Assistant
The Hon. Frank R. Wolf (VA-10)

Tom,

I occasionally banter with my friend, Mike Griffin on subjects that  include golf, the AGW scare and NASA policy.  After sending him my latest tirade, he shared with me his recent letter to you regarding taxpayer-funded space research.  I promised him that I would send you my thoughts on the debate, which follow:

From my past comments on NASA’s post-mid-70s manned space efficiencies/accomplishments, an observer might think that I would applaud a decision to turn this important responsibility over to commercial developers.  However, he would be wrong.

No question, it would be good to see commercial companies quickly succeed at orbital access and to take that capability beyond low earth orbit.  However, I am fearful that the commercial guys will fail; i.e. they will do little more in my remaining lifetime than NASA accomplished in 3.5 years with Gemini in the mid 1960s.  That would be a very big
mistake for America to make, as we move into an era of real competition in space exploration as well as risk the loss of our leadership in nearly every other technical discipline.

Mike Griffin’s excellent statement says it best; “I too want, in the strongest possible terms, to have government policies which serve to stimulate private development of space. But at the same time, I too am reluctant — with an analogy to instrument flying — to give up an airport where I know I can get in on the approach, for one where I might”.

What I would like to see is a decade or two of overlap – an initial push in the commercial arena of manned spaceflight (Development programs, not Research programs), while NASA flies risky new ideas (read, true Research programs, giving at least a chance of discovering an important new Breakthrough), and at the same time pushes the forefront of Exploration beyond the earth’s moon.

Imagine how much better America could motivate our youth if we were spending the billions of Stimulus Package money on making real progressin our efforts to someday colonize off the planet.

Two years after Neil and Buzz landed on the moon, America led the world in awarding PhDs in science/engineering/math.  Today we are not even on the first or second page and most of our University’s technical graduates take their skills back to their own countries to compete with us. The motivation of our youth is the most important thing we do for our nation’s long-term security and prosperity.  NASA’s role in that can be as critical as it was in the 60s if the taxpayers fund true Research and Exploration.

The attachment is a photo I took at the Shuttle STS-130 launch - Caption: “Reaction when told about the President’s NASA directive to abandon manned spaceflight”.

As always, I am ok with the distribution of my thoughts without limitation.

While I usually offer candid remarks at the drop of the hat, I am not interested in Congressional testimony, since under duress I occasionally have been known to blurt out the truth.  I have no interest in being in the same room with John Holdren….. Taking a line from a very old play: ”I must turn away, least I soil my hands with the blood of a fool”

Burt Rutan

Tweet This Post 

Next Page »

• Categories

  • Civil Space Flight
  • Climate Change
  • Commercial Space Flight
  • General Space Topic

• Archives

  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009

• Links

  • Armadillo Aerospace
  • Atlas Aerospace
  • Bigelow Aerospace
  • Blue Origin
  • Commercial Spaceflight Federation
  • Excalibur Almaz
  • Masten Space Systems
  • Mojave Air & Space Port
  • NASTAR Center
  • National Space Society
  • Orbital Outfitters
  • Orion Propulsion
  • OSIDA
  • Paragon Space Development Corp.
  • Scaled Composites
  • Space Adventures
  • Space Florida
  • Space News
  • Space Operations Communicator
  • Space: What Now? Blog
  • SpaceDev
  • Spaceport America
  • Spaceport Sweden
  • SpaceX
  • Virgin Galactic
  • Wordpress Themes
  • Wyle Labs
  • X Prize Foundation
  • XCOR

• Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • WordPress
  • XHTML

• Flash Poll

  Would you live on the moon?

  • Yes
  • No

  View Results

   Loading ...
  • Polls Archive

• Syndication

  
• 
• 
• 
• Wikio

• Great Science Books

• Books and DVDs I Recommend

• Recent Posts

  • Offer New ISS Real Estate As Hub For Orbiting Space Commerce
  • Former Senator Schmitt Cites Strong Constitutional Justification for Selected Federally Funded Research
  • Vast Reserves
  • Caterpillar Inc. Joins Sponsors of Astrobotic Expedition
  • Opportunities of a Close Call

• Tip Jar

  Donation Amount:
  (Currency: USD)

  Put my Donation on the Recognition Wall

  Show on Wall:
  Do not show any information Donation Amount, User Details & Comments User Details & Comments Only

  Name:
  

  Email:
  

  Website:
  

  Comments:
  
  Write your comment within 199 characters.

  

• Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org