Alan Boyle has a review of what looks to be an interesting book on SpaceShipOne
While I mentioned it in my Pajamas piece on Wednesday, I neglected to mention yesterday that it was the 51st Sputnik anniversary. More currently, and relevantly, it was the fourth anniversary of the winning of the X-Prize. Jeff Foust has some thoughts on the seeming lack of progress since then.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:34 PMAlan Boyle interviews the first man to relieve his bladder on the moon, about the Moon, Mars and the Gap. And it's great to see him (and Lois) still going strong. And as he points out, there are a lot of fortieth and fiftieth anniversary news hooks coming up. I hope to take advantage of them as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AMClark has a round up of links.
It was a little strange, and sad, descending into the LA basin yesterday. I had a left window seat, and I looked down at the old Rockwell/North American (and back during the war, Vultee) plant in Downey, which had been abandoned back in the nineties, and saw that Building 6 appeared to be no longer there. A lot of history in manned spaceflight took place there, but now there's almost no manned space activities left in southern California at all. Not in Downey, not in Huntington Beach, not in Seal Beach. It's all been moved to Houston, and Huntsville.
Except, except. A minute or two later, on final descent into LAX, I saw Hawthorne Airport just off the left wing, and quite prominent was the new SpaceX facility, which had previously been used to build jumbo jet wings.
So perhaps, despite the indifference of local and state politicians, the era of manned spaceflight in LA isn't quite yet over. And of course, Mojave remains ascendant.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:42 AMI have a new piece up on this week's non-discovery of water on Mars.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:15 AMI explore the proposition, over at The Space Review today. Also, editor Jeff Foust has a good writeup on a recent panel discussion on the prospects for government and private spaceflight.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AM...why can't we kick the fossil fuel habit? Well, we can, but not the way we put a man on the moon, and certainly not within a decade. On the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first landing, I explain.
[Afternoon update]
It's interesting to note that the original landing was on a Sunday as well. I don't know how many of the anniversaries have fallen on a Sunday, but I would guess five or so. It's not too late to plan to commemorate the event with a ceremony at dinner tonight, with friends and family. Also, a collection of remembrances here. If you're old enough to remember it yourself, you might want to add one.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AMHere's the obit at the WaPo for Len Cormier.
As a staffer with the Academy in 1957, Mr. Cormier was in attendance at the International Geophysical Year proceedings when the Soviets surprised the world with the launch of Sputnik.
The event made a tremendous impression on him, his family said. He decided then to pursue better access to space through affordable, reusable space vehicles.
He was an early visionary. Others will have to pick up his torch now.
Fortunately, a lot of other people now recognize the need:
The National Coalition for CATS, working with leading figures across the space community, will collaborate over the next twelve weeks to develop a "National Declaration for Cheap and reliable Access to Space (CATS)." The CEOs of non-profit and for-profit companies will be invited to sign the Declaration, and will deliver this declaration to the next President of the U.S. after the November election.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend NewSpace, which starts tomorrow in Washington, and where this will be announced, due to financial constraints. It will be the first conference I've missed in a while.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AMOn July 16th, 1969, the largest rocket ever built thundered off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, delivering three men and the equipment and supplies they would need to land two of them on the moon and return the three of them safely to earth, fulfilling the national goal declared eight years earlier. The anniversary of the landing is this coming Sunday.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:32 AMNext Sunday will be the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first human footsteps on another world. As I do every year, I'd like to remind my readers of a ceremony that I and some friends came up with to celebrate it. If you think that this was an important event, worthy of solemn commemoration, gather some friends to do so next Sunday night, and have a nice dinner after reading the ceremony.
Oh, and coincidentally, Friday was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the fall of Skylab. James Lileks has some thoughts. Next year, it will be the fortieth, and thirtieth anniversaries, respectively, of the two events. It was ironic that our first space station came plunging into the atmosphere almost exactly a decade after the height of our space triumphs in the sixties. The seventies really sucked.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:37 AM...is that too many people will think that it's true.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:41 AMI just got an email from Pat Kelley:
I received a call from Anne Greenglass to tell me that Len's ashes will be interred at Arlington cemetery with full military honors on September 17. Any of Len's friends and cohorts who are in the Washington area on that date are welcome to come to the service. As we get closer to the date if I have any more information I will pass it along.
He's referring to Len Cormier, who died of cancer a few days ago.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:54 PMSorry I didn't mention it yesterday so you could listen live, but hey, the ability to download and listen at your own convenience is one of the features of the Interweb. Last night I did a one-hour interview with Rick Moran on space stuff. Download it here.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AMI just got the sad news from Pat Kelley:
Len took his final journey this morning, passing peacefully. His family is going to have his ashes interred at Arlington cemetery, but I have no schedule. For those who wish to express condolences, you can reach his life partner, Anne Greenglass via email, [email me for the address if you want to do so--rs].
I tried to address this notice to all the people on my list, but I'm sure there are others I may have missed, so please forward this to anyone else you feel would want to know. I do intend to continue trying to get backing for Len's last design (Space Van 2010) as a tribute.Len was a truly unique man, and a rare breed these days. Always the gentleman, honest to a fault, and always ready to give credit where it was due (and sometimes even allowing the unworthy to take credit for his work, for the sake of an important effort). He is unreplaceable, and will be sorely missed.
Ad astra, cum laetitia, Len.
[Previous post here]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:58 AMThe commentary continues over at Clark Lindsey's place about how long it will/should take to get low-cost access into space. I probably should respond to this one comment, though, since it seems to be advancing a lot of mythology about me and weightless flights.
Rand Simberg is a right wing nutjob, but, he is a true believer in space. He went with Weaver Aerospace to sell Zero-Grav flights to Ron Howard for the Apollo 13 movie. He had the proposal, he had the aircraft, he had a credible charter operator. NASA dove in and gave the flights away for free. Sadly, Simberg then went and did the same deal for "From the Earth to the Moon" and NASA did it to him again.
Well, to start off, of course (and nothing to do with space), but I'm neither "right wing" or a "nutjob." As far as I know.
But to deal with the more substantive statements, this is mostly wrong. I did put in a proposal to Ron Howard's production company for Apollo XIII, and I did have a charterable 727 lined up. Our plan was to palletize the movie set, and use the freight doors to load and unload between shoots, so the airplane could continue to be used for other things. We weren't going to get a special type certificate for it, as Zero-G did (at a cost of millions of dollars and many years), because it was going to be flown on an experimental certificate out of Vegas or Mojave. This was all greased with the local FAA FSDO, with whom we had worked to do T-39 flights for R&D, using Al Hansen's plane in Mojave (he's Burt's next-door neighbor).
But NASA didn't "dive in and and give the flights away for free." NASA originally sent Howard's people to me, and I had a meeting with them in Century City, when they asked me for a proposal. I submitted the proposal, and was told by the executive producer that they were looking it over, but before they were going to make a commitment, they wanted to try if in the K-bird first, to see if filming was practical in that environment. I was suspicious, but there wasn't much I could do. At the same time, they were telling NASA that we couldn't do the job, and that they had fulfilled their obligation to try to find a commercial provider, so now they had to use the KC-135. So they basically lied to both me and JSC. I don't think they got free flights--I believe that JSC was reimbursed some (probably arbitrary, since NASA never knew what the Comet really cost) amount per hour.
Somewhere I actually documented the history for NASA, and sent it to June Edwards (I don't know if she's still with the agency) at Code L (legal office) at HQ, when she had to do some fact finding at the behest of Dana Rohrabacher's office. Unfortunately, I lost it in a hard disk failure a few years ago.
Anyway, NASA was not the villain. We were both lied to by people in Hollywood (I'll give you a minute to express your shock at the very thought of such a thing).
Oh, and as for "From the Earth to the Moon," I never had any involvement in it whatsoever. It was basically a lot of the same people, given that it was a Tom Hanks production, and they just went back to NASA. I saw no point in wasting my time trying to put together another proposal that would be sure to be rejected.
And of course, when Lee Weaver was killed in an auto accident, a couple weeks before 911, that was pretty much the end of any interest I had in getting a weightless flight business going, after almost a decade of struggle, and a lot of debt, with which I'm still burdened.
Peter had money lined up for Zero-G, and I didn't see any way to break in, when it was uncertain how large the market would be. Also, if I'd known what he had to go through to get the special type certificate for the airplane from the FAA, I'd have probably not even attempted it. He might even feel the same way, for all I know, but he's through the tunnel now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 AMI didn't see Len Cormier at Space Access in March, though he has rarely missed one in the past. Now via an email from Pat Kelley, I learned why:
I'm sad to announce that Len Cormier is losing his battle with cancer. I spoke with him today, and he's in a hospice awaiting the end. I've had the privilege of his friendship and professional partnership for over ten years, and I hate to see this come to an end before my goal of at least giving him the satisfaction of seeing a project birthed from his incredible intellect at least get started.
Len is not terribly religious, but I know he would not be offended by good wishes, prayers, or whatever means you may choose to honor him. I will miss him.
I don't know how far from the end it is, and where there's life there's hope, so I won't talk about him in the past tense. But if he doesn't make it, it will be a damned shame. No one living has been talking about affordable access to space, and worked as hard at it as Len, having been an advocate for almost half a century. He was also one of the gentlest men, in the gentleman sense, that I've ever met, always gracious, even in the face of unreasonable criticism and often vituperation.
It's a tragedy that he is leaving us just as the funding dam is starting to break on the kinds of projects that he has been advocating for so long, and that he won't see the results. He should go knowing, though, that he played a significant role in laying the ground work for it, and inspired many who will carry on in his stead. Despite his failure to achieve his audacious goals, I think that he'll be far more than a footnote in the history of astronautics.
[Update a few minutes later]
Another email comment from Rick Jurmain:
Len's a man with dreams too grand for a single lifetime. That's as it should be.Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:41 AM
Or, to paraphrase Sunset Boulevard: He is big. It's the space program that got small.It's been an honor to work with Len. I'll remember him.
Alan Boyle has a review of what looks to be an interesting book on SpaceShipOne
Well, it's actually the latest Carnival of Space, over at the Lifeboat Foundation, but it's pretty Phoenix-centric.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 AMCongrats to JPL on the successful (so far) landing of the Phoenix. Interestingly (though almost certainly coincidentally), it happens on the forty-seventh anniversary of Kennedy's speech announcing the plan to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
And (for what it's worth--not much, to me, and even more certainly coincidentally) it's the thirty-first anniversary of the initial release of Star Wars in theaters. I didn't see it that day, but I did see it within a couple weeks. I remember being unimpressed ("the Kessel run in twelve parsecs"...please), though the effects were pretty good. But then, I was a fan of actual science fiction.
[Update late evening]
It's worth noting that (I think) this was the first soft landing on Mars in over twenty years, since Viking. Surely someone will correct me (or nitpick me) if I'm wrong.
[Monday morning update]
OK, not exactly wrong (it has been over twenty years), but it's thirty years. I'm pretty good at math. Arithmetic, not so much.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 PMDennis Wingo remembers Ernst Stuhlinger.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:43 PMAnyone out there know what they're using for comm these days? Do they have a TDRSS system as part of the ISS operations agreement? Or something else? Or both?
[Update about 1 PM EDT]
Via an email from Jim Oberg:
Mir used to have a TDRSS-like system called 'Luch', and a dish antenna capable of communicating with the GEO relay satellite is installed on the Service Module now linked to ISS.Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 AM
But it's never worked. The old system broke down and wasn't replaced in the 1990's. There are one or two payloads already built, at the Reshetnev plant in Krasnoyarsk, but they won't deliver them until the Russian Space Agency pays cash -- and by now, their components have probably exceed their warranties anyway.The Russians have a voice relay capability through the NASA TDRSS, but can't relay TV or telemetry, so they conduct how-criticality operations such as dockings or spacewalks only when passing over Russian ground sites. They don't even have ocean-going tracking ships any more -- all sold for scrap [one is in drydock as a museum].
The current state of play, according to Glenn Reynolds. There was a piece on the subject in Sunday's Boston Globe as well. I wish that Congress would do something about this. It would have a lot bigger effect in the long run than deciding how much to underfund a failed Constellation concept.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AMWow.
NASA is actually considering abandoning ISS until they can resolve the safety issues surrounding the Soyuz currently docked there (and in general).
This whole fiasco reveals a fundamental design (in fact conceptual) flaw of the station from the beginning (one that was shared by the Shuttle)--a lack of redundancy and resiliency. NASA had the hubris to think that they could design and build a single vehicle type that could not only have the flexibility to satisfy all of the nation's (and much of the world's) needs for transport to and from space, but do so with confidence that it would never have cause to shut down (and remove our ability to access LEO). They learned the foolishness of this notion in 1986, with the Challenger loss.
Similarly, they decided to build a manned space station, that would be all things to all people--microgravity researchers, earth observations, transportation node, hotel--because they didn't think that they could afford more than one, and so they have no resiliency in their orbital facilities, either. If something goes wrong with the station, everyone has to abandon it, with nowhere to go except back to earth.
Having multiple stations co-orbiting, with an in-space crew transport vehicle (which could serve as a true lifeboat) was never considered, though the cost wouldn't necessarily have been that much higher had it been planned that way from the beginning (there would have been economies of scale by building multiple facilities from a single basic design). That would have been true orbital infrastructure.
Instead, we have a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) space station supported by a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) launch system, with only the Russian Soyuz as a backup. And because there is no place nearby to go, if there's a problem on the station, everyone has to come home, and the crew size is thus limited by the size of the "lifeboat," (which is a "lifeboat" only in the sense that it is relied on for life--in actuality, it's much more than that. It's as if the "lifeboats" of the Titanic had to be capable of delivering their passengers all the way to New York or Southampton).
And now we can't trust the backup, and we have no lifeboat at all.
Now that the ISS is almost complete, it is capable of supporting the Shuttle orbiter on orbit for much longer periods of time by providing power, so its orbital lifetime is no longer constrained by fuel cell capacity. But it's still not practical to leave an orbiter there full time, because a) with only three left, we don't have a big enough fleet to do so without impacting turnaround time for the others and b) we're not sure how long it's capable of staying safely without (say) freezing tires or causing other problems, because the vehicle wasn't designed for indefinite duration in space.
So as a result of flawed decisions made decades ago, NASA is in a real quandary. They can leave the crew up there, and cross their fingers that a) nothing goes wrong that requires an emergency return and b) that if the return is required, the Soyuz will work properly. Or they can abandon the station until they resolve the Soyuz issues (something over which they have absolutely no control, and will have to trust the Russians).
Sucks to be them.
[Update a few minutes later]
Not that it solves this immediate problem, but Flight Global has a conceptual rendering of a European crew transportation system (presumably based on the ATV) that could (in theory) be available within a decade.
[Another update]
Here's more on ATV evolution, over at today's issue of The Space Review.
[One more thought, at 11 AM EDT]
NASA doesn't seem to have learned the lesson of Shuttle and ISS, because Constellation has exactly the same problem--a single vehicle type for each phase of the mission. If Altair is grounded, we can't land on the moon. If the EDS has problems, we can't get into a trans-lunar orbit. If something goes wrong with Orion, or Ares, the program is grounded. Why aren't there Congressional hearings, or language in an authorization bill, about that?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:53 AMThomas James writes that NASA is (with little fanfare) disposing of the tooling to build Shuttle Orbiters.
This doesn't make it impossible to build new ones--the blueprints probably remain available, and new tooling could be built in theory, but it dramatically raises the (already ridiculously high) costs of building any replacement vehicles. Even if we were to continue to fly the Shuttle, we will do so with a three-vehicle fleet, so we would never get a flight rate higher than the current one (which is the highest it's been this year since we lost Columbia). Until we lost another one, anyway.
This really is a point of no return.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:42 AMWhile this Orlando Sentinel columnist makes some valid points in his criticism of the space agency, he also takes some cheap, and unfair shots.
You know we are headed for a boondoggle when the agency's marketing division starts up a Web page called, "Why the Moon?"
And the first sentence is, "If you asked 100 people why we should return to the moon, you'd probably get 100 answers -- or more!"Translation: We can't come up with one good one.
I'd call that a mistranslation. It's like saying that we shouldn't have removed Saddam because we didn't find WMD. It really is possible for there to be more than one reason to do something (and in fact, most decisions are made on that basis--any one reason might not, per se, be sufficient, but a combination of them often are).
It may in fact be true that none of the reasons listed are good (I haven't bothered to check out the site to see), but one certainly can't logically infer that from the fact that there are more than one, or even a hundred. But this part is actually a misrepresentation of history:
NASA once took on the mission of providing cheap, routine access to space with the shuttle. Then it took on the mission of building and servicing a space station.Then came two shuttle disasters. And before the station was even half-built, agency officials began complaining they had no mission and needed to fly off into the solar system.
We still don't have safe and routine access to space. And now, we won't have our grandiose research platform up there either.
Which "agency officials" were making such complaints? Can he name names? In reality, much of NASA would have been content to continue to fly the Shuttle, complete the station, and finally hope to get some value out of it, even after Columbia. There are no doubt "agency officials" who, if asked over a beer, would say that would be the best course even now, given the problems with Ares 1 and Orion, and the fact that we have been getting a lot better at launching Shuttles. That was certainly the prevailing agency attitude in 1989, when President Bush's father announced the Space Exploration Initiative, and NASA sabotaged it both indirectly, by coming up with a ridiculously overpriced program, and directly by actively lobbying against it on the Hill (one of the reasons that Dick Truly was fired).
In general, it's unfair to blame NASA for what is really a failure of the entire federal space policy establishment. NASA doesn't establish goals, or make policy (though it will often play bureaucratic games to attempt to influence it).
The space station was the "next logical step" in proposed plans for space, going all the way back to the fifties, based on von Braun's vision. The problem was that the "logical step" before it was to establish affordable and routine access to orbit. The Shuttle was an attempt to do, but a failed one. Unfortunately, the policy establishment failed to realize this until long after space station plans had jelled into one dependent on the Shuttle (and later, the Russians, which is why it is at such a high inclination, increasing the cost of access).
Yes, NASA "took on the mission," but it failed at it. And with subsequent failures, such as X-34 and X-33, the nation has learned the wrong lesson--that if NASA can't reduce cost to orbit, it can't be done, and we should simply give up on the project, and go back to the way we did it in the sixties. But the failure wasn't due to the fact that it can't be done, but rather than it can't be done the way NASA does things: developing and operating its own systems, for its own uses. Government agencies, by their nature, are not well suited to either developing or running cost-effective transportation systems.
It is understandable and natural to want to maximize the value of something in which we have invested many tens of billions of dollars over the years, and it does seem like a waste to abandon the ISS just a few years after its completion, which took decades to accomplish. But there's a concept called "throwing good money after bad" in which too many people engage. The fact that we spent a hundred billion dollars on ISS doesn't make it worth a hundred billion dollars. It may, in fact have negative value, like the proverbial white elephant that costs too much to feed and care for.
The mistake of the Vision for Space Exploration was not in establishing a national goal of moving the nation (and humanity) beyond earth orbit. Such a bold and broad policy statement of our ultimate goals in space was in fact long overdue.
The mistake was in specifying in too much detail the means and schedule to do so, and in the failure to recognize that we never completed the job that was supposed to be performed by the Shuttle--developing affordable access to space. This is a capability without which attempts to open up the frontier will remain as unsustainable as they were during Apollo, and to repeat Apollo (albeit in slow motion), which is essentially NASA's current plan, is to repeat that mistake.
Yes, the Shuttle was a mistake, as was a space station based on the assumption that it had met its goals, but that doesn't make the goal of the Shuttle a mistake. Achieving that goal remains key to supremacy in space, for both civil and military purposes, and it has to be done before we can seriously contemplate human exploration and development of the solar system. But to blame NASA for these mistakes is wrong, not just because there's plenty of blame to go around, but because if we believe that NASA is the problem, we won't address the other very real sources of the problem, and we'll continue to make such policy mistakes.
[Monday morning update]
More commentary over at Clark's place.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:29 AMIt's been a year since Henry Cate kicked off the Carnival of Space. He's asking for entries for the anniversary edition:
Fraser Cain, the current organizer of the Carnival of Space, has graciously asked me to host the anniversary edition of the Carnival of Space.Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AMCould you:
1) Consider sending in an entry to the carnival? Send the link to a post about space to:
carnivalofspace@gmail.com. It is helpful if you include a brief summary of your post.2) Encourage your readers to also send in an entry?
You could direct them here.
Until Yuri's Night. It will also be the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first Shuttle launch.
Looking at the map, the only Florida party I see is up in Cocoa Beach. Between Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami, you'd think that south Florida would be able to come up with something.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AMIt's hard to believe, but it's been five years since Columbia was lost. I was up in San Bruno at the time, getting ready to drive home to LA. Here was what I blogged about it immediately upon hearing. I think that most of my initial speculation has held up pretty well. Also check though the February 2003 archives for a lot more space commentary from the time. I wrote three related pieces at Fox News (here and here) and National Review in the next few days.
Was this as traumatic and memorable as the Challenger disaster? No, for several reasons. We didn't watch it live on television, there was no teacher aboard to traumatize the kids, and we had already lost our national innocence about the Shuttle. Still, people might want to post remembrances here.
[Update mid morning]
I'd forgotten about these. Columbia haiku that I and my commenters came up with.
[Late afternoon update]
Clark Lindsey has more anniversary links.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AMI have some thoughts about space anniversaries, over at Pajamas Media.
[Update a few minutes later]
Alan Boyle has a more detailed and humanized history of the Explorer 1 mission. Though I should add, as I say in my own piece, that the belts weren't "discovered" by the satellite--their theoretical existence had previously been proposed by Christofilos, so finding them was confirmation, rather than a complete surprise.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:39 AMI know that it's been half a century since America entered the space race, with the successful launch of Explorer I. I'll have a long piece up at Pajamas Media today or tomorrow on all of this week's space anniversaries.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:37 PMI'll have a piece up on this myself later in the week (the anniversary is actually Thursday), but John Noble Wilford has some thoughts on the past fifty years since Explorer I.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:03 PMThis weekend, I met a young woman, now attending law school in Ann Arbor, who was in diapers when it happened. To her, it's ancient unremembered history, just as the Eisenhower administration is to me (though I at least study it, unlike most of my age cohorts). It made me feel old. We have a generation, though, about ten years older than her, now in their thirties, for whom it was probably the most traumatic event of their young lives. The comments are closed on my post from six years ago, but anyone who wants to post remembrances can do it here, with the caveat that I still haven't completely recovered from my recent MT upgrade (still hoping that someone who knows it will volunteer to help), so you can use them, but they will time out. Don't expect to get a response after submitting the comment. Just back up after a while, and refresh the page to see it.
I'm particularly interested in how the event changed your perception of the Shuttle, and the space program in general, if at all, per my previous thoughts.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:28 PMThis is a week of space anniversaries. Yesterday was forty-one years since the Apollo fire that killed three astronauts on the launch pad as horrified technicians watched during a ground test. Thursday will be the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the first US satellite, Explorer I. Friday will be five years since the Columbia disintegrated over the otherwise quiet morning skies of Texas.
But today is the twenty-second anniversary of the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, an event that traumatized the nation as millions of schoolchildren watched the first "teacher in space" go up in a fireball on live television. I'll never forget the date because it was then (as it remains) coincident with the anniversary of my birth.
It wasn't obvious to many at the time, but that event was the beginning of the end of the Space Shuttle program, then less than five years old, with its first flight having occurred on April 12th, 1981. Prior to that flight, there had still been plans (that some thought fantasies, due to budget restrictions and ongoing problems of turnaround time) of twenty-four flights a year (including a couple per year out of Vandenberg AFB in California). The catastrophe was a splash of cold water in the face of those who had held out hopes for the Shuttle in terms of meeting its original promises of routine, affordable, safe access to orbit. Those promises had caused people (like those in the L5 Society) to dream of space stations, and space manufacturing, and ultimately, space colonies.
After the disaster, many realized that if those dreams were to come true, they would have to be by some means other than the Shuttle (a realization that some later took one step further and decided that NASA itself was unlikely to be of much help in achieving the goals, particularly since it continued to flout the law, and had no interest in them whatsoever). But the program went on, because it was all NASA had for manned spaceflight, and it maintained jobs in the districts of politically powerful congressmen and senators. Though there had been disillusionment about the promise of the program, there was no political will to replace it. The few (misguided) attempts (NASP, X-33, SLI, OSP) to replace it all floundered or failed. The latter two morphed from one to the other. The program thus struggled along with four orbiters, and a low flight rate, with occasional fleet stand downs due to endemic problems, such as hydrogen leaks at the interface, or other concerns.
But the final blow was struck five years ago this coming Friday, with the loss of Columbia. The fleet was down to three birds, and unlike the case after the loss of Challenger, no structural spares had been procured with which to build a new one, and the tooling for them had long since been scrapped. So the decision was finally made, almost seventeen years after the loss of the first orbiter, to end the program.
Unfortunately, what is planned to replace it, Ares 1/Orion, will be little improvement, and in some ways a major step backwards. It will launch even fewer crew than Shuttle, and while the Shuttle was a heavy-lift vehicle capable of delivering twenty tons to the space station, the new system will deliver little payload other than crew. It will have minimal ability to return payloads and no ability to return the types of payloads that the Shuttle could. It will likely cost as much or more per launch, particularly when having to amortize the development costs, which had been long sunk for the Shuttle, and it's unlikely to launch much, if any, more often. We will go from a system that could deliver a few government employees (along with a couple dozen tons of paylad) into space a few times a year, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per flight to a system that can deliver fewer government employees (with essentially no paylad) into space a few times a year, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per flight. The only saving grace is that, in theory, it can also deliver people to the moon, and it may be somewhat safer.
But the Shuttle started out with a dream: of dozens of flights per year, of low costs per flight, of many flights for many purposes, some of which would be privately funded for private purposes. In canceling most launch vehicle technology development, and returning to a horrifically expensive concept from the 1960s, NASA has in essence officially declared that dream dead.
Fortunately, investors don't take NASA as seriously as they used to, and the dream now lives on in the form of new private companies, determined to open up the heavens to all of us, and not just a few civil servants. If we hadn't lost the Challenger over two decades ago, the Columbia loss might have been seen as an anomaly in an otherwise-successful program. As in 1986, it might have simply been replaced (albeit at great expense) with the structural spares that were earlier used to build Endeavor, and the program might still be lumbering on, keeping us trapped in low earth orbit, and continuing to crush the dreams of those who believe that we can do better. If that loss back then was a necessary catalyst to ultimately end the program and spur on efforts to do better privately, even if delayed, then perhaps the sacrifice of the Challenger crew will, in the long run of history, be viewed as not for naught.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:50 AMI know, comments are still broken (though I think you may be able to comment if you have a TypePad account). I'm going over to Naples for the weekend, though, so no solution until Monday (which is also the Challenger anniversary).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AMMuch hoopla was made of the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik a couple months ago.
I haven't seen anyone mention that a half century ago today, the first Vanguard mission, the American response to Sputnik, was a spectacular (and televised) failure on the launch pad, which simply heightened the concern we had about the Soviets being ahead of us in space ("Our rockets always blow up"). I wonder if history might have been much, or any different had it succeeded?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:34 PMI hadn't noticed, or noted it last week, due to my travel schedule and poor internet connectivity, but last Monday was the sesquicentennial anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He was the first, even before Goddard, to lay out the mathematical and physical foundations of spaceflight.
But unlike Goddard, he was a theoretician only, and never built any hardware. So I don't think he ever said "Hold my vodka, and watch this..."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:45 PMThe only moon landing in history is NASA's Apollo expedition in 1968.
Well, it did happen a long time ago. Probably the twit who wrote this hadn't even been born. Anyway, I wonder where the Russians will get the money for a manned moon mission?
It's been ten years since the Mars Pathfinder Mission.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 AMWith less than a week to go until the centennial celebration, Dwayne Day has an interesting bit of space history about Robert Heinlein over at The Space Review.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:56 AMScott Lowther is now selling a kit for the DC-X.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:18 AMJim Oberg debunks it:
In late 1958, as NASA begin defining how to select astronauts, President Eisenhower directed that test pilots be the pool from which candidates were selected. The actual flight experience of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions in hindsight validated that standard. Because of the intimate integration of the pilot in the spacecraft’s control system (unlike the automated Soviet space vehicles that were less dependent on pilot intervention during malfunctions), astronauts on several occasions were able to safely complete missions that, on autopilot, would have led to failure and death.That was the historical context, warts and all, of the decision to select astronauts exclusively from among test pilots initially, and supersonic jet pilots subsequently—a decision with the unintended consequence of ruling out the participation of women. To have done differently, on purpose, for symbolic reasons, would have been to add immeasurable (but arguably non-zero) hazards to a project that was generally considered already almost too hazardous to perform in any case. Whenever NASA has unconsciously relaxed safety standards, disasters have followed, from Apollo 1 to Challenger to Columbia.
Avoiding confrontation with this rationale and blaming it all on male ego and sexism has denied the university’s intellectual community—and the news media’s readers—the useful opportunity to consider which of the two approaches to women’s access to spaceflight (the American or the Soviet one) produced the greatest long-lasting “good”. By what criteria should a national approach to overcome historical cultural exclusion and attain an “adequate” level of gender-independent access be deemed to have succeeded? This is a serious question worthy of significant national discussion and debate, but not a hint of the question appears in the recent coverage.
I could have categorized this as media criticism as well, because that's what it is. The reality is that, right or wrong, NASA wanted seasoned test pilots for its first human space flights. The other reality was that, in the late 1950s, women didn't do that.
It's sad that so many of them, like Wally Funk, feel that they were cheated, perhaps even justifiably, but that's less a result of unfairness as perhaps unreasonable expectations, or being misled. One of the benefits of making space activities private is that much of the political correctness and general politics of astronaut selection will go away, and people who are physically capable (which is most people) will be able to go without getting the approval of some government functionary.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:27 AMI'm hearing rumors that Wally Schirra died last night.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, apparently Keith heard it on CNN as well.
So, Grissom, Slayton, Schirra, Shepard are gone. Besides Glenn, who's still with us?
[googling]
OK, Cooper is dead, so it's just Glenn and Carpenter. They could hold a reunion in a phone booth. And I see that Wikipedia has already updated the Mercury 7 page to reflect Schirra's passing.
[Update at 12:30 PM EDT]
Here's the obit from CNN.
Hadn't thought about that, but it's true, he was the only astronaut to fly Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:30 AMIt's been forty-six years since the first human went into orbit, and twenty-six since the Shuttle first flew. Here's what I wrote a year ago, on the forty-fifth and twenty-fifth anniversary.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:09 AMKeith Cowing has some amusing (and ironic) old space station propaganda.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:14 AMJonathan Gewirtz has found some, down in the Everglades. I hadn't previously been aware that there were plans for a solid booster for the Saturn.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:40 PMThomas James noted another anniversary yesterday--the end of the last manned mission to the moon, thirty-four years ago.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AMDwayne Day completes his fascinating speculations about what would have happened with Apollo had Kennedy lived.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:29 AMJames Gibbons has some memories from Apollo.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 AMUntil Moon Day.
Start planning your commemoration dinner now. Invite family and friends, and contemplate the date.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:24 AMRand, Jeff and Dwayne are treating a 40-year delayed entry into the "US-Soviet space race" (or perhaps the Chinese would prefer "space era") as newsworthy. For its military threat or for its ability to shed light on perceptions and the press. I think the interesting story that no one is telling is why the Chinese mimic the dead end space programs of the US and the USSR. It's some kind of misguided nostalgia or timewarped hero worship. It is captured well by Ursula Le Guin's The Telling. What does China think it will get out of a space program other than some more confidence from its neighbors that its missiles can hit their targets? Spinoffs? National prestige? This kind of grand challenge from yesteryear is weird nostalgia like the Space Cowboys movie. (I hinted at this last year, but no one seemed to pick up on it.)
The trick is to harness this misguided lunacy to use it to improve international relations and lower the cost of space access.
I wonder if the same people who discount SpaceShipOne's and Falcon's cheap space access are playing up China's old tired expensive space access as a worrisome game changer. Maybe it's the same reason we dissed China's currency policy--to get them to keep doing it to waste their money.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 11:21 AMAlan Wasser and I think that space property rights are the main thing holding back development of the Moon. Dwayne Day says (last paragraph) that launch cost is the main thing that is holding us back. I don't think that was true when Saturn Vs were in production.
While high launch costs as a barrier may be temporarily true today, I think that cheap access would be developed to the Moon if it could be claimed legally and the property rights enforced (and may anyway if Elon Musk is to be believed).
The Saturn V Wikipedia entry cites these cost numbers. They add up to $6.42B peaking in 1966-7. The launch cost estimate in Astronautix of $431M is just $6.42B/15. While they list a bunch of R&D contracts that precede the Saturn V line item, they were sunk costs at the time of Saturn V deployment. If someone has a better number please comment. A summary of Schmitt comes up with $3B per launch including $500M in capital costs. Those costs should be written off as sunk (i.e., a company that incurred them would declare bankruptcy and emerge with no debt). The $2.5B remaining is the 2005 price of $431M in 1967 dollars.
Am I missing something? Is pad construction, tooling, design and so on not included in the original $6.4 billion? If non-recurring costs made up a good fraction, then it's a way overestimate.
Griffin puts the marginal cost at $100M in 1970 dollars or about $500M today. That would give us $2000/lb to LEO. If we had continued to put $15B/year in current dollars into Lunar development, that would be about 87.5 million pounds to LEO in the last 35 years if 1/3 of the money was spent on launches or over 15 million pounds to the Moon assuming no improvement over 1960s technology (and to be fair no bureaucratic price inflation beyond the consumer price index). That is about 75 international space stations worth of mass.
No, I think the main reason we abandoned the Moon was lack of national will, not price. The price point for colonization can be achieved if the national (or subnational or even rich guy) will comes back. My proposition is that Lunar property rights would be the impetus to set these wheels back in motion. I dare you to prove me wrong.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 06:03 AMSpace access last year was an excellent conference. I met Jeff Foust and have been writing for the Space Review ever since. I met David Livingston and was since on his show twice, signed his corporate space ethics pledge and have co-authored a paper with him. I met Thomas Olson and now I am on the Colony Fund's board of advisors.
But comparing last year's program to this year's there are several differences.
There are more political and regulatory discussions this year. Last year we praised Tim Hughes, who was pivotal in getting 5382 passed. This year, he is presenting. Last year political priorities was part of "open mike" time. This year there is a panel. Last year there was one presentation from AST. This year there are two. Last year there was an informal workshop on the FAA AST license process. This year there is a panel discussion on policy.
I am part of the change. On Friday night, I am co-presenting a paper first posted here. (Look for an update as soon as I can get it uploaded.) There is also a new panel discussion about what venture capitalists are looking for. These two additions really focus on calibrated business-goal setting, and filtering and tempering the pro-space rhetoric to enhance credibility.
The community will be taken more seriously if it graduates from being a victim to being proactive about removing alleged barriers, upholding standards of ethics and the professionalism on the business side of space access. This change was already underway last year, but perhaps in the next few years Space Access may yet become the kind of tacky commercial conference that Esther Dyson prefers.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:39 AMKen Silber has a review of a new biography of what is probably the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's strangest founder.
I don't recall reading much about him in the history of JPL. I only recall Malina (who was a little...different... himself), and Tsien Hsue-Shen, who was later hounded out of the country, after which he returned to his native China and helped develop their missile program.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:56 AM...that almost flew in the mid-1980s. From behind the veil of the Cold War, some previously unseen pictures have emerged. Note that this was while the Soviets were complaining about Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
Via email from Jim Oberg, who notes:
This was the bird that the Soviet's military built and planned to launch without telling Gorbachev -- he found out, and ordered the rocket test to proceed but the payload to not be activated.Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:33 AMConveniently -- and I suspect, not accidentally -- the orbit circularization burn at first apogee failed. May 1987, I recall.
Had it gone into orbit, while Reagan was president, it would likely have sparked a major 'Stars Wars' space military race with potentially dreadful consequences.
Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee died horribly, from asphyxiation and incineration, in a test of the Apollo capsule. It caused a massive overhaul of the Apollo program, but less than two years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:36 AMThirty-five years ago, on another Christmas Eve, men first rounded our nearest planetary neighbor. They were in radio silence on the far side, for a few minutes the loneliest men in existence.
The reentered the world of humans as they emerged from the shadow of the moon, and read from Genesis. At that time, despite the government funding, the ACLU had no complaints, as far as I know.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:29 AM