Don Peterson has a long disquisition at SpaceRef about why we shouldn’t go to Mars via the moon.

The problem with this, of course, is that it presumes that the only goal is to go to Mars. He seems to recognize no intrinsic value in returning to the moon, or in establishing a base there. He’s welcome to his opinion, of course, but that’s not in concert with the president’s goals, and in my opinion, he’s wrong. There are many reasons to go back to the moon, as were laid out by several witnesses to the Aldridge commission a few weeks ago, regardless of its eventual utility in supporting a Mars flight.

The post Rand links to below brings up some issues that have been floating around in the amateur rocketry community for some time. There are some people within the community who claim that there is no realistic problem, but they are simply wrong. If amateur rocket scientists are to have any relevance to opening the high frontiers they will develop weapons relevant technologies. The simple and obvious reason for this is that rockets are a transportation technology, and as such they can be used to transport harmful payloads just as aircraft, boats, and trucks can.

Continue reading Amateur Rocketry and Terrorism →

I’ve gotten a few comments on this post that I want to respond to on the front page. They’re subjects that I’ve discussed before, but there are probably a lot of new readers here, since many of them presumably came via the link from he whose links must be followed and NRO.

Several people expressed comments along the lines below, but I’ll just respond to this particular one, since it’s pernicious, and I commented at some length on this right after Columbia was lost last year.

I take some offense at the idea that, since we’re planning to replace the shuttle fleet anyway, we can send them up to do more dangerous missions because we don’t need them for much longer. I’m sorry, but if the safety of the astronauts is in question, as you indicated, then we should not send them up. The shuttles may be expendable, but the humans are not.

I’m sorry that you take offense, but any other idea is irrational, despite your claim to be a science and math teacher. Read again what you wrote. You are saying that human life is infinitely precious, and that there is nothing that’s worth its risk.

Now, it’s debatable whether or not a Hubble repair is worth that particular risk, but the attitude expressed here will make the president’s new human exploration plans moot, since we cannot guarantee the safety of astronauts who go to the moon, or even into low earth orbit, let alone Mars.

I know that this will sound politically incorrect, but the reality is the exact opposite of this reader’s commentary. We have more astronauts than we know what to do with, but we only have three orbiters, and they are essentially irreplaceable, since most of the tooling for them and knowledge of how to build them is gone. It would take several years, and many billions of dollars to replace one, and it would be an extremely foolish expenditure. So the decision as to whether or not to save Hubble with a Shuttle has (or at least, should have) little to do with crew safety, and everything to do with whether or not we’re willing to risk a third of the remaining fleet. In my opinion, it is worth it, if the odds are 98% success.

This is why the notion that we should send the Shuttle up without crew is senseless. The major asset at risk is the orbiter itself, and sending it up sans people (as another commenter suggested) does nothing except dramatically reduce the possibility that the mission will be successful, at very high cost. Hubble was designed to be serviced by astronauts, and that’s the most reliable means for it to be serviced this time as well. If a telerobotic mission is successful (and I consider such a mission very high risk–a subject on which I’ll be discoursing further in the coming days), it can be done without Shuttle, and an uncrewed Shuttle adds zero value to a Hubble repair mission.

Let’s get this straight once and for all, folks. The primary purpose of sending an orbiter into space is to deliver astronauts into space–the other cargo capacity is just lagniappe. Unmanned orbiter missions are largely pointless, given their ridiculously high cost, yet the notion continues to surface, among both the public and people who should know better, like Congressmen.

This commenter below is entitled to his opinion that:

Hubble needs to be replaced, and not having a telescope in space for a couple of years isn’t a big deal at all.

But his opinion is apparently not that of the space-interested public, or there wouldn’t have been such a hue and cry when NASA made the decision. There’s no question that Hubble needs to be replaced, but it’s continuing to provide good science (and beautiful images) and given that we’re going to be continuing to spend billions on the Shuttle program, money largely wasted, it would be nice to get a little value out of it for this mission to keep the system alive until it’s replaced with something better.

Finally, as to this:

Your probability calculations tell me (I’m a math and science teacher, for the record) that you have fallen into the infamous “gambler’s fallacy”. Basically, the gambler’s fallacy goes something like this: if I flip a coin, and it lands on heads, then the next time I flip the same coin, it is more likely to land on tails, since the coin should land on heads and tails in roughly even amounts. In fact, the probability on the second flip is still exactly 50/50. What you have said here is equivalent, though with a smaller probability. You seem to be claiming that, because the shuttle has a 98% (or so) success rate, and the remaining shuttles have made a large number of successful trips, that the probability of them being destroying is increasing with each successful mission. While this may be true from an engineering standpoint (since parts and materials degrade over time), you can not reach that conclusion by looking at straight probabilities.

I have no idea how he could so misinterpret what I wrote. I am claiming no such thing, and I don’t know how I even “seem” to be claiming it. I repeat: “At that reliability, there is a forty percent chance of losing another orbiter (which would cost billions and years to replace) in the next twenty five flights. There’s a two in three probability of losing one in the next fifty. That means there’s an excellent chance of losing one over the next ten years, at an optimistic flight rate of five per year.”

My claims are that if there is a two percent chance of loss per mission:

• There is a two percent chance of losing the Hubble mission, which is, after all, a…mission
• There is a forty percent chance of losing an orbiter and crew in the next twenty five flights
• There is a sixty seven percent chance of losing one in the next fifty flights

With which of these statements does our math and science teacher disagree? Which of these statements represents the gambler’s fallacy, or says anything about extrapolating the probability of the success of the next flight from past performance?

Jay Manifold has some disturbing thoughts on the recent successful amateur space launch. He’s right–we are going to have to come up with some smart solutions to this problem, or we may remain bound to the planet, which is just one of many ways in which the terrorists could win.

This is, of course, a generic problem with the development of any advanced technology as it becomes increasingly less advanced, and available to a wider distribution of people on the bell curve, both in terms of judgement and evil intent. This was one of the things that had Bill Joy’s knickers in a knot a few years ago.

NASA was surprised by the reaction to its announcement a few weeks ago that it wasn’t going to risk a Shuttle crew to keep the Hubble Space Telescope alive.

It apparently underestimated the popularity of the program. It shouldn’t have.

How many people have screen savers of the Shuttle payload bay, or the space station?

How many, in contrast, compute to a background of the Eagle Nebula, or other Hubble images?

Many, particularly in the space science community, were quick to point out the timing of the decision. Was it just a coincidence that, just a few weeks after the president’s announcement on January 14 of a new human-exploration space policy, in which NASA’s resources would be focused on the goals of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars, Hubble life extension was pronounced to be an unworthy cause on which to risk a Shuttle flight?

Well, actually, it was.

While some of the motivations of the agency in this action remain murky, it’s safe to say that, despite the timing, the decision probably wasn’t a result of the new space policy. The most likely suspect remains the CAIB report on the loss of the Columbia last February, which was released last fall. While the commission didn’t specifically recommend not flying to non-ISS orbits, this was an inferred recommendation from many of the others, given that it’s quite possible that the Shuttle crew might have lived, even had the vehicle been written off, had their mission been to the station, where the damage might have been clearly seen and they would have had a safe haven.

But in the timing of all these events and decisions, there seems to be a disconnect in terms of policy. To the degree that the Hubble decision was based on the Gehman recommendations, that decision must now be revisited. Here’s why.

The Gehman report was delivered last fall, before the president’s January speech. At that time, the space policy of the United States was, among other things, to continue to fly the Space Shuttle as long as possible, until a decision was made to replace it, and its replacement developed. With the loss of Columbia, we had only three orbiters in the Shuttle fleet, making each one very precious if they were to support a program of indefinite duration, particularly given the now-empirical reliability of ninety eight percent (two losses in about a hundred some flights over twenty years). Despite any improvements they’re making, that’s probably the number that NASA is using to estimate future losses, to be conservative.

What does it mean?

At that reliability, there is a forty percent chance of losing another orbiter (which would cost billions and years to replace) in the next twenty five flights. There’s a two in three probability of losing one in the next fifty. That means there’s an excellent chance of losing one over the next ten years, at an optimistic flight rate of five per year. Hence the eagerness to follow the Gehman Commission’s recommendations and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to solve the problem, because the prevailing policy is to keep the Shuttle fleet flying until it’s no longer needed.

OK, now fast forward to January 14th of this year, when the president announces, among other things, that the Shuttle is to be phased out with the planned completion of the International Space Station, in 2010, six years from now.

It’s a new policy world. NASA no longer has to worry about sustaining a three-orbiter Shuttle fleet into an indefinite future–they’ve been told that it only has to fly another thirty flights or so.

In fact, here’s the irony.

While its critics are lambasting the agency for sacrificing Hubble on the altar of the new space policy, the new policy in fact would actually justify a Hubble mission. Consider–if it’s no longer essential to maintain a three-orbiter fleet into the indefinite future, the two percent risk of losing an orbiter now looks small compared to the value of keeping Hubble going for several more years, until we can be assured of a worthy replacement. If, against the odds, we do lose another orbiter on that mission, the worst case is that it will simply take another couple of years to complete station, at which point we’ll still shut down the fleet, if the new policy is to be believed.

So here’s the policy disconnect.

We have one part of NASA (the Shuttle program) furiously running off to implement the recommendations of the CAIB, recommendations which were based on a circa-2003 policy made obsolete on January 14th, 2004, with apparently no recognition of the events of that date. We have another part of NASA desperately trying to implement the new, January policy.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that the expensive and delayed Shuttle return-to-flight activities (the latest estimate is to fly again is March, 2005, almost two years after the Columbia loss, and approaching the ridiculously-long standdown after Challenger) should reflect the new, existing policy, and not the old one in which the Gehman report was written. It’s conceivable that, if asked, the commission might not change any of their recommendations, but it’s insane not to ask them, given the dramatic change in national space goals since they issued the report.

Accordingly, I propose that the Gehman Commission be reconvened to weigh in on this issue. It need not be a several-month-long process, or disrupt the lives of the commission members to the degree that the first one did. No long investigations are needed, no facts have changed, except that the nation has a new space policy. It would be appropriate to gather the commission members in a room once more, to review their recommendations from last fall, and to reconsider them in the light of the new space policy that the president announced in January. It need not take more than a day or three.

The costs of it would be minimal, particularly considering the ongoing costs of NASA continuing down an expensive and perhaps pointless road, one costing many hundreds of millions of dollar per year, in developing expensive fixes to a system that we have already stated as policy will be phased out in much less than a decade.

Mr. President, Administrator O’Keefe, please reconvene the commission. Please reconcile this apparent disconnect of the policy of yesteryear with the forward-looking policy that you proclaimed over three months ago. It may indicate that the current NASA policy is correct, but it might alternatively save many millions of taxpayer dollars on fruitless fixes to an obsolete program. And it may create many more beautiful images from distant times and distant galaxies, images that satisfy both scientists’ curiosities, and peoples’ aesthetic souls.

SubOrbital Day went off pretty smoothly today. We basically walked around in teams briefing Senate staffers on issues of importance to the emerging suborbital launch services industry (see below for our talking points, which pretty much cover everything we talked about). The message was well received for the most part.

We were a little disorganized due to the fact that the principal players are busy building hardware (woohoo!), but everything came together in the end. One kind of cool thing that happened while I was briefing Landon Fulmer, a legislative correspondent for Sam Brownback – the door to the conference room opened up and in walks General Pete Worden, who is working as a Congressional Fellow in Brownback’s office. While I was recovering from my surprise, Pat Bahn (who was my teammate) showed up from his previous appointment (we’d split up to make up some lost time). Fortunately Worden and Pat know each other, as evidenced by the fact that Worden offered to deliver Pat’s canned SubOrbital background briefing. He did an excellent job of it, too. It’s nice to have people who really get it in positions of influence.

I had a similar surge of hope when Steve Parker, a Legislative Fellow in Bill Nelson’s office, started asking about the Black Armadillo. Very encouraging, especially considering we were meeting in a room covered with Space Shuttle pictures – I thought making the SubOrbital pitch would be like trying to sell Linux to Bill Gates. A pleasant surprise indeed.

It was nice to catch up with the SubOrbital Institute usual suspects, though Neil Milburne of Armadillo wasn’t there, most likely since they are building and testing hardware at a furious rate. There’s going to be some interesting news in the coming months, not just related to the X Prize. Unfortunately I can’t divulge everything, but stay tuned.

Boy, ask and ye shall receive. A few more posts like that, on a regular basis, Andrew, and I could retire. Unfortunately, this blog has a lousy pension plan.

And after y’all have read Andrew’s post on Suborbital Day, head over to The Space Review, where Jeff Foust explains, once again, why we shouldn’t build a new heavy-lift vehicle.

The Saturn 5 proved that heavy-lift vehicles can enable human exploration of the Moon. It

Today is SubOrbital Day, a lobbying event for the SubOrbital Institute. I’ve cut ‘n’ pasted the talking points for the day below the fold. I’ll post more later, possibly tomorrow if the evening wrapup is especially festive. We’ll be walking around Capitol Hill briefing Senate staffers on the issues below, trying to encourage them to take action that will make it easier for you and me to get into space.

Continue reading SubOrbital Day →

SpaceShipOne flew to over two hundred thousand feet today. In a sense, as Jim Oberg points out (via Alan Boyle, and by the way, congratulations on the second anniversary of Cosmic Log), at that altitude, it could be said to be the first private manned vehicle to fly into space.

It’s looking more and more like that insurance company that funded the X-Prize is going to lose the bet, but I’m still hoping for an upset for the prize by some upstart.

Spacearium is running a series of posts on the history of the American Rocket Company. Here’s the first one.