Thanks to Michael Mealing (see comment here), I’m back on the air, and waiting for the first talk (Wendell Mendell, lunar guru from Johnson Space Center).

[Update about 9 AM]

Dr. Mendell is relating a history of how his thoughts have evolved on getting back to the moon. Brief summary: he started out naive in the early eighties, and but eventually came to realize that NASA was incapable of carrying out the vision, and that private activities will be the key. He made a variation of a theme that I’ve commented on in the past (when I called space, including currently low earth orbit, a wilderness). He described it as an undeveloped country with vast resources, but no infrastructure.

[A few minutes later]

He’s hammering on a theme now that Paul Spudis reinforced yesterday in the keynote address: that various players are working hard to subvert the president’s initiative to support their own agendas. Moreover, the continued focus on Mars indicates that people were not listening to what the president said (he mentioned it only once, as part of the phrase “Mars and beyond”).

He’s knocking down the misconceptions that the only purpose of going to the Moon is to learn how to go to Mars, or to test equipment that will be used on Mars.

More thoughts on this later (and probably a column or two) after I collect my thought, and am not distracted actually listening.

[Another update]

This was mentioned briefly yesterday, but Dr. Mendell says that there is serious talk among some at NASA of doing a “touch and go” on the Moon. In other words, immediately after a lunar landing, we’ll then go on to Mars, thus somehow (in their demented view) having satisfied the letter (if not the spirit) of the president’s vision.

NASA has published a report (PDF) on last month’s Centennial Challenges Workshop (thanks to Neil Halelamien over at sci.space.policy for the pointer).

I haven’t read the whole thing, but I did go look to see what they did with my glove idea.

I regret that I wasn’t there–they made some decisions that I would have argued about. I think that the glove should be 8 psi, not 4.3–a large part of the idea was to eliminate the need for prebreathing and avoid risk of the bends. I like the idea of providing plans for gloveboxes to the contestants, and think that worrying about someone injuring themselves is silly, not because it’s not a danger, but because it’s a danger we have to accept if we want to progress. I still like my task idea of tearing down and rebuilding an auto, or motorcycle engine. I proposed a million, and they came up with a quarter million (though they recognize that the amount may be too low–it’s driven by legal constraints which will hopefully be removed in the future).

Anyway, it looks like a promising start, and Brant Sponberg should be congratulated. Let’s hope he can keep the ball rolling.

SpaceRef has a summary of the hearing on prizes for space achievements, held on the Hill this morning.

Molly Macauley made an excellent point:

“Even if an offered prize is never awarded because competitors fail all attempts to win, the outcome can shed light on the state of the technology maturation. In particular, an unawarded prize can signal that even the best technological efforts aren’t quite ripe at the proffered level of monetary reward. Such a result is important information for government when pursuing new technology subject to a limited budget,” she said.

The DARPA Challenge is a good example of that, in my opinion.

Of course, we have the usual caviling:

“While establishment of a NASA prize program is certainly worth considering, we should not be lulled into thinking that it is any substitute for providing adequate funding for NASA’s R&D programs,” cautioned Subcommittee Ranking Minority Member Nick Lampson (D-TX).

Rep. Lampson is one of the representatives from JSC.

Overall, while there were some appropriate cautionary notes, there seemed to be a consensus that this was a good idea. Let’s hope that they can get the funding now.

Andrew, that piece really is worse than you say.

The trouble is that the space program’s purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.

No, the trouble is not that they are inseparable–it’s that we’ve never made a serious policy attempt to achieve such a separation.

He gets the NASA budget wrong (it’s closer to twenty billion than fifteen). That doesn’t change his point (in fact it strengthens it, to the degree that it’s valid), but it’s sloppy. It’s also not clear that the plan will require a significant increase. That was one of the selling points of it–that by putting down the Shuttle program, we can shift funds to the new activities.

Along the way, the space commission he appointed has offered up a smorgasbord of absurd side benefits, such as possible improvements in our (so far non-existent) ability to deflect threatening incoming asteroids, of the sort that may have severely disrupted life on Earth as recently as 35 million years ago.

I guess his point is that it doesn’t happen very often, so it’s not a benefit. He’s probably unaware that if the Tonguska event had occurred on the eastern seaboard of the US, instead of in Siberia, we could have lost millions of lives only a century ago.

It really is a typical “why pour all that money into space when we have so many problems on earth?” rant. Nothing new here.

[Update in the afternoon]

Jeez, I’m almost starting to feel sorry for the schmuck. Dwayne Day really goes after a gnat with a howitzer in the comments section.

I’d say that he’s been pretty thoroughly discredited. Unfortunately, most of the PI’s readers probably don’t read this blog.

Can someone explain to me why Aura is a NASA mission, and not a NOAA mission? It seems to me that if one wants to focus NASA better, this is the kind of thing that would be better done by a different agency.

Over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Alex Roth has an op-ed piece that is simulteneously insightful and inane. It’s no mean trick to pull that off, but he manages to do so. He correctly identifies some of the problems with NASA:
The trouble is that the space program’s purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.
…but immediately follows with this pointless slur:
The very concept of a “space station,” for example, is a 1952 brainchild of Nazi rocket scientist-turned-American-Cold Warrior Wernher von Braun, who was later caricatured as “Dr. Strangelove” in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War satire film.

I enjoy a good rant as much as anyone (OK, probably more than most), and Roth has certainly written a stem-winder. Unfortunately getting a few small points right is not enough. The editorial is well written from a polemical standpoint, but it utterly destroys a strawman that nobody in either the alt.space or NASA communities believes.

It’s worth a few minutes just to familiarize yourself with his arguments, since they will be coming up again, and it’s good to know what the other side is saying.

Leonard David has a report from Las Vegas on what Bob Bigelow is up to with inflatable space structures. I probably haven’t emphasized this activity enough. If SpaceX is successful, we will soon have a private space habitat testbed launched on a private launch vehicle.

So what

Michael Mealing reminds us about this weekend’s Return to the Moon conference, in Vegas. So I do too…

On next week’s thirty-fifth anniversary of the first manned lunar landing?

[Via Rob Wilson]

[Update a few minutes later]

Boeing has established an anniversary web site.

Via RLV News, the presentations from the most recent COMSTAC meeting are available. I haven’t read any of them yet, but I figured I’d post a pointer. I’m a little snowed under trying to make sure I’ve read everything I ought to read in order to do a decent job for the SOI, but I think the paper by Terry Hardy on Ec[*] calculations is a good place to start. I’m beginning to think that the single best paradigm change for moving towards a sustainable and vigorous spaceflight industry is a public safety regime that doesn’t use Ec as a figure of merit. Ec is a little bit like man rating in that it implicitly assumes that the norm for space vehicles is that they blow up with some regularity.

[*] for those not already familiar with it, Ec is the expected number of casualties from operations of a given launch vehicle. You need less than 30 casualties per million flights in order to get a launch license.