He won’t stop talking. He used to call me and bend my ear quite a bit. But he means well.
Category Archives: Space History
Failure Is An Option
The Long Space Age
This looks like an interesting new book
Why The Patriarchy Hates The Moon
I think Sam Kriss had a little too much time on his hands.
The National Space Council
I don’t know whether or not it will help with the current policy mess. It probably partly depends on who heads it up (that is, the real day-to-day work, not Pence).
This is strange:
According to historians, in 1992, council staff convinced Bush to fire the NASA chief because they thought he would resist their ideas. As is the case in many bureaucratic environments, the dysfunction of the council had little do with national interest or policy, but with office politics.
Truly wasn’t fired because the council staff “thought he would resist their ideas.” He was fired because he was actively sabotaging Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative, and actually having his AA for legislative affairs lobby against it on the Hill.
[Update a while later]
Stephen Smith has a blog post on the (meaningless) NASA authorization ceremony last week. Trump seems remarkably uninformed, but that’s true of most subjects, I think.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Jeff Kluger says that magical thinking won’t get you to Mars. But a) this isn’t an appropriation and b) he seems to think that we can do Apollo again.
This Morning’s Historic Launch (And Landing)
Tim Fernholz provides some perpsective.
Half A Century
Fifty years ago, three astronauts died on the launch pad in a ground test. It occurs to me that, like the Kennedy assassination, this was one more event that, had it not occurred, the moon landings may not have been successful. There were many problems with the program that weren’t seriously dealt with until after that disaster. It reinforces the reality of how unlikely the success of Apollo was, and why it’s foolish to think we can replicate it half a century later.
Meanwhile, Commercial Crew is delayed again. Because it’s more important to not lose an astronaut than to end our dependence on the Russians, even though at this point, we should have no confidence in their systems. While crew flights use Soyuz, not Proton, they both use the third stage that just failed on the Progress mission. And they seem to have systemic problems in their aerospace industry.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s a piece from the WaPo.
[Update a while later]
Andrew Chaiken asks, did it have to happen? They were being very sloppy. They hadn’t had any problems with pure O2 in Mercury or Gemini, so they ignored the issue. I’d forgotten the name Marty Cioffoletti; he went on to work on the Shuttle, and I worked with him occasionally in Downey in the 80s.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a useful bottom line, that I’ve been thinking about this week, in the context of the book:
A month after the fire, NASA’s director of manned spaceflight, George Mueller, said in a Congressional hearing that NASA’s experiences with Mercury and Gemini “had demonstrated that the possibility of a fire in the spacecraft cabin was remote.” Mueller’s words lay bare the false logic that, in the pressure to meet President Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline for a lunar landing, had skewed the thinking of nearly everyone at NASA: It hasn’t bitten us, so we must be okay. This fallacy would strike NASA again, with the O-ring leaks that brought down the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the broken-off chunk of foam insulation that doomed its sister ship Columbia in 2003.
It’s nice to think that if we only spend enough money, and take enough time, we can ensure that no one ever dies, but as I write in the book:
No frontier in history has ever been opened without risk and the loss of human life, and the space frontier will be no different, particularly considering the harshness and hazards of it. That we spend untold billions in a futile attempt to prevent such risk is both a barrier to opening it, and a testament to the lack of national importance in doing so.
Those men died because we were in a rush, because what we were doing — beating the Soviets to the moon — was at the time considered important. But now, “safety is the highest priority.”
[Update a while later]
There are a lot of 50th anniversaries of Apollo this decade (e.g., first landing in July, 2019), but today's is the most tragic.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) January 27, 2017
[Mid-morning update]
OK, I had forgotten that the Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature on the same day. It didn’t get as many headlines.
The Space Shuttle
Amy Shira Teitel explains why she’s not a fan:
“I Heard Them Scream ‘Get Me Out Of Here.'”
“…then there was silence from the pad.”
Eric Berger writes about Apollo 1, on the fiftieth anniversary. I remember it, the day before my birthday. It was a huge wake-up call for the Apollo program, which ultimately resulted in beating the Soviets in the space race less than two years later, with Apollo 8.
Gene Cernan
He never wanted to be the last man on the moon, and he almost certainly won’t be, but it’s a shame that he didn’t live to see the next man (or woman) kick up the regolith.
But he didn’t cover himself in glory, or make it more likely to happen, when he testified in ignorance against private spaceflight back in 2010 (the headline of the story is incorrect; they weren’t “defending spaceflight” — they were unwittingly attacking it). He was a hero of the Cold War, and should be honored for that, but his passing shouldn’t be an excuse for a new bout of misguided Apolloism from conservatives.
[Update a while later]
“It appears we are condemned to forego the human exploration of the solar system until the full measure of the first generation of space explorers has passed.” It didn’t have to be, and some of that generation, including Cernan (and Walt Cunningham), didn’t help.