I’d like to take another little war break here, for a post on loftier and more inspiring subjects.

I know that I’m often (but justifiably) hard on NASA and the ISS, but watching the orbital construction going on right now is pretty damned cool. It’s like when I was a kid and was fascinated by the bull dozers, but much better. It almost makes me feel like I’m living in the twenty-first century, even without the flying cars.

I don’t have NASA TV, but those who do can probably see it non-stop for the next few hours. Fox is cutting to shots of it occasionally. The video isn’t great–it’s a little grainy–but you can clearly see the swirling blue ocean and clouds slowly scrolling past the station on the earth over three hundred miles below.

How anyone can think that there’s no market for views and experiences like that is totally beyond me.

Anyway, for those who want to get down and pa-tay to celebrate space, the Yuri’s night party is tomorrow night. The flagship party is at the Air Museum at the Santa Monica airport, and they’ll be linked by video with the other parties, and the space station. I just got this press release:

Yuri?s Night: The World Space Party, rocking the world on April 12, reached its goal of 100 parties today by blasting into orbit. The 99th and 100th Yuri?s Night parties take the form of video messages from the International Space Station (ISS) and the US Space Shuttle.

The greetings transform Yuri?s Night from a planetary celebration of space to one that has taken its first steps into the solar system.

?I just wanted to tape a short greeting to all of those of you who are attending Yuri?s Night,? said astronaut Jim Newman, speaking 360 miles above the Earth?s surface onboard Shuttle Mission STS-109. ?There are really no boundaries visible from space,? Newman continued, ?and I just wanted to leave you with this short message, celebrating the accomplishments of humans in space, and hoping for a better future for humans on Earth.?

Newman?s message will join a special greeting from the Expedition Four ISS Crew of Yury Onufrienok, Daniel Bursch and Carl Walz, that will be broadcast worldwide on April 12.

Both videos will be the centerpiece of Yuri?s Night parties around the world. The dual recordings hold particular significance for Yuri?s Night, as April 12 is not only the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin?s historic first spaceflight, but also the anniversary of the first launch of the Space Shuttle.

The Space Station greeting was recorded at the Russian Mission Control Center in Korolyov, Russia, and made possible by the support of the Youth Space Center, Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU). Victoria Mayorova, Youth Space Center Director, Yulia Stetskyuk, BMSTU student, and Julia Tizard, a student at Manchester University, joined forces to bring the World Space Party into orbit.

?Yuri?s Night unites humanity in a peaceful celebration of space,? said Tizard. ?Since humanity is now in orbit, it only makes sense to celebrate Yuri?s Night there as well.?

I’ve previously talked about how we’re in a decade of fortieth space anniversaries. Well, today is a fiftieth anniversary of a very significant space-related cultural event.

Fifty years ago today, the first of a series of popular space articles was published in Collier’s Magazine. This was a collaboration with several space engineers (including Werner von Braun and Willey Ley) and space artists, including the incomparable Chesley Bonestell.

It presented a future in space that helped prepare the American public for the upcoming space age. It included von Braun’s vision of expansion into the solar system, nurtured even while he was designing the V-2 rockets for Hitler’s Third Reich. The series described crewed reusable shuttles, large wheeled space stations (as later depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), lunar shuttles and bases, and manned flights to Mars. It later resulted in a Disney animated series that was shown on Sunday nights.

Unfortunately, for many reasons, the future didn’t turn exactly as von Braun, Ley, Bonestell and others envisioned. NASA was formed in response to a public panicked by Sputnik, and then diverted from a slow, rational development of the high frontier to the Cold-War imperative of beating the Russians to the Moon (and per Lyndon Johnson’s desires, helping industrialize the South) with the Apollo program. Once this pattern had been set in place, the space bureaucracy acquired an institutional inertia that has prevented us from making much further progress, at least in proportion to the funds expended on it.

There’s another article on the topic from Space.com a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it’s used as the background of a depressing puff piece for NASA and the International Space Station:

Some of the elements of the “Collier’s Space Program,” like the creation of crewed rockets, a reusable space shuttle and the first landings on the moon, have already been achieved. With a few trial runs behind us, we soon will be a step closer to a permanent crewed space station — the next stage in the magazine’s imaginary conquest of other planets — once the International Space Station goes on line.

Yeah, right. No one on that team envisioned going to the Moon and then abandoning it. Or a reusable Shuttle that would fly only half a dozen times a year at a cost of over half a billion per flight. And there is nothing in the design (or location) of ISS that will allow it to make much of a contribution toward going to other planets.

At a planned size of 356 x 290 feet [118 x 97 meters], the ISS will favorably compare to von Braun’s 250-foot [83-meter]- diameter ring-shaped station, which the Collier’s team designed to hold 80 people.

Favorably compare?!

By what criteria? Apparently this guy thinks that size means something. Because it’s a few tens of feet larger (because the solar panels stick out that far) than the planned wheeled station, he thinks that it’s a better station, even though the wheel held 80 people, and ISS holds three (and perhaps a dozen if it ever gets fully built).

However, unlike the ISS, the Collier’s station would have been built exclusively by U.S. funds. Given estimates that such a structure could be built by 1967, the total bill would have come in at around $4 billion in 1952 dollars.

And even accounting for inflation over the past fifty years, it would have been a bargain, compared to ISS, particularly when one considers that it had artificial gravity, and held an order of magnitude more people.

Australian David Sanders has produced a documentary of what life would have been like over the past half century had that vision been actually carried forward. From his website:

This film is based on an alternative timeline to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era of reality – it is based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950’s in Colliers actually came to pass – and sooner than they expected.

Through the expert use of special visual effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the world of wonder and imagination expressed though Collier’s has become real. The film Man Conquers Space looks like a documentary from the 1960’s, complete with varying grades of film quality, scratches and lab marks, and a tinny soundtrack – just the way it would appear today if it had indeed been made over 30 years ago on the limited budget afforded to documentary makers of that era.

David has the vision, even if Washington has lost it. Check it out.

[Update at 1:30PM PST]

Dr. Al Jackson has a web page commemorating this series, with his own personal recollections.

The Lance Bass visit to space is apparently back on, with sponsorship from Radio Shack. Both Lunacorp and Mircorp apparently negotiated the deal (Lunacorp, a company that plans to place rovers on the Moon that can be teleoperated from earth, for a fee, had previously attained Radio Shack sponsorship for its concept).

The Lance Bass visit to space is apparently back on, with sponsorship from Radio Shack. Both Lunacorp and Mircorp apparently negotiated the deal (Lunacorp, a company that plans to place rovers on the Moon that can be teleoperated from earth, for a fee, had previously attained Radio Shack sponsorship for its concept).

The Lance Bass visit to space is apparently back on, with sponsorship from Radio Shack. Both Lunacorp and Mircorp apparently negotiated the deal (Lunacorp, a company that plans to place rovers on the Moon that can be teleoperated from earth, for a fee, had previously attained Radio Shack sponsorship for its concept).

We had another (cosmologically speaking) close call the other day; a piece of cosmic debris passed within half a million kilometers of the planet, a little farther than the distance to the Moon. It was previously uncatalogued, and approached us from the direction of the sun–our blind side.

If it had hit, it would have been at least as devastating as the Tonguska explosion in Siberia early last century, in which trees were leveled for miles around. Such a strike in a populated area could kill thousands, or millions.

Current estimates of the probability of such an event are one in ten million. I’ve previously discussed the desirability of at least doing a good sky survey to get a handle on the problem, but I’d like to talk again about a little different aspect of it.

Suppose that, after multiplying the probability times the potential damage, and getting some kind of expected value of avoidance, we do decide that this is a problem to which we should devote societal resources. Who should take care of the problem?

Many would reflexively say NASA, just because (unfortunately) NASA remains synonymous with space in many people’s minds (though I’m working daily and weekly to change that perception). But NASA is an agency set up for research, development, and science–not deflecting wayward space rocks.

Well, it’s a threat, so maybe we should put the Pentagon in charge. This actually makes sense, until you think about the problem a little more. If we were being attacked by ET, or Marvin the Martian or his Martian buddies, then sure, let’s send the Space Patrol up there to kick some scrawny Martian butt.

But this is a natural phenomenon, not a smite from heaven at the behest of some malign intelligence (at least as far as we know). It’s more like a forest fire, or a tsunami, or an earthquake, or a…flood.

A flood–yeah, that’s the ticket.

It’s basically just a problem of managing the whims of nature, and to the limited degree that we are capable of doing that, we have an agency in charge of such things. They build dams, and levees, and suchlike, and take preventive measures against future disastrous natural events. They’re called the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE).

In addition to the fact that it seems like a natural (so to speak) role for them, the other thing that I like about the idea of using the ACE is that they could take fresh approaches–they wouldn’t be bound by the institutional inertia of NASA and the Air Force Space Command in how they’d tackle the problem.

They’d have to take new approaches, because it would require different capabilities than any other space activity to date–moving minor planets. And the technology that allows us to divert asteroids to prevent them from pulverizing the neighborhood is the same technology that will allow us to utilize many of the abundant resources available in the solar system.

Finally, it would set up some competition in government space activities, which is sorely needed, and best of all, it might give them something else to do so they won’t have time to build any more of those dam…err…darn dams.

[Update at 7 PM PST]

Jay Manifold has a nice report direct from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference with the latest thoughts of planetary researchers on the subject.

Yesterday’s Opinion Journal had a piece by Ralph Peters on how the fact that we are now seeing more casualties in Afghanistan is a “good” thing.

While at first reading, such a statement sounds appalling, I agree, in the relative sense of the word “good.” That the casualties have so far been low has possibly been an indicator that our war strategy has been insufficiently aggressive, and insufficiently…effective. Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have killed some of our troops, and who we are now destroying, escaped from Tora Bora last fall, when we relied on Afghan troops to corral them, rather than putting our own at risk. Tragically, but necessarily, some of our own are dying now so that future others, perhaps in the thousands, or millions, many of them women and children, will live.

Risk-averse strategies can fail in many spheres–not just military campaigns. In the training and fitness industry, there’s an old saying (crass though it may sound in the context of dedicated soldiers who will never come home to their families…) of “no pain, no gain.”

And any competent financial analyst can describe the indisputable and inevitable relationship between risk and reward. That’s why junk bonds pay a much higher interest rate than the debt of blue-chip stocks, or why startup firms offer a potentially much larger rate of return–with the corresponding chance that the entire investment may evaporate.

The same principle applies to research and development. Over the years, particularly since the Challenger disaster, NASA has become risk averse to the point of impotence. They will spend billions of taxpayer dollars in analysis, to avoid an outright and telegenic failure, even if the goal of the program itself is not achieved.

As an example, consider the X-34 program. It was supposed to produce a vehicle that would demonstrate the ability to fly hypersonically, reliably, as a major step on the way to affordable space access. (Unfortunately, NASA insisted that the contractor use an engine developed by NASA, which they later said was never intended to be a usable engine).

After the vehicle was mostly developed (minus the engine that the vehicle had been designed for, per NASA specifications), and NASA had a failure in a Mars mission, the agency decided that X-34 lacked sufficient redundancy and safety to fly. When they got an estimate of how much it would cost to add these (unnecessary) modifications to add the required redundancy, NASA decided instead to cancel the program.

Result? The vehicle never flew.

And the data obtained from it?

Zero.

All because NASA was unwilling to risk a failure of an experimental vehicle (the purpose of which is to determine whether or not a particular technology is viable or worth pursuing further).

If you want to know why only governments can afford spaceflight, seek no further than the outcome of this program…

As regular readers will recall, someone was posting to the Cheap Access To Space (CATS) BBS looking for his lost felines.

It turns out he’s even more clueless than we thought.

According to his website (sorry, no link–this is second-hand info), he’s trying to set up a no-kill, no-confinement shelter for cats. No confinement. For cats. And he wonders why they keep going missing…

Also, he’s upset because the Humane Society keeps taking his cats away. Apparently, he’s decided to run for governor of “Minnessoeda” to solve the problem.

Well, if Jesse Ventura can win…

Bryan Preston has some heartburn over some of my space commentary (I’m not sure exactly which, because he doesn’t provide any specific links).

I guess my problem with Simberg is that he focuses exclusively on the manned space flight program, and just ignores everything else that NASA does.

That’s because I don’t have that much of a problem with the other things that NASA does (though I think that the aeronautics program has a lot of problems as well). What JPL does is great, for the most part, though they could do it even better if launch were lower cost and more available. Hubble is one of the many things that NASA has done that is worthwhile, even with the initial cockup.

But my point is that there is more to space than science, and 1) NASA is unwilling to recognize it, and doesn’t do those non-science things very well, yet it receives exhorbitant funding for them and 2) NASA pretends that the manned space program in particular is about science, when it is certainly not–it is about jobs and national prestige.

The manned flight program is usually the most visible part of NASA, but the science mission is arguably the most important– that’s where most of the real ground-breaking research is taking place. And with programs like Hubble that require in-orbit servicing, you can’t have one without the other at this stage. NASA will evolve into whatever the American taxpayer wants and needs it to be, but calling it “socialistic” and calling for its defunding is just hyperbole without thoughtfulness.

When I (accurately) call NASA that, I am primarily talking about the manned spaceflight portion.

Sorry to burden my gentle readers with Yet Another Space Policy Post, but over at Spaceref, Keith Cowing has a description of NASA’s new criteria for public space travelers, at least those planning to travel to the International Space Station. I find it quite troubling, and hope that my readers will as well.

“ISS crewmembers shall refrain from any use of the position of ISS crewmember that is motivated, or has the appearance of being motivated, by private gain, including financial gain, for himself or herself or other persons or entities. Performance of ISS duties shall not be considered to be motivated by private gain. Furthermore, no ISS crewmember shall use the position of ISS crewmember in any way to coerce, or give the appearance of coercing, another person to provide any financial benefit to himself or herself or other persons or entities.”

As Keith points out, this could have a potentially chilling effect on any commercial activities aboard the station. Can’t have any of that free enterprise stuff up there…

Also, there are some criteria that might be usable for arbitrarily keeping people off the station:

The following list defines some of the factors that would be considered as a basis for disqualification: (a) delinquency or misconduct in prior employment/military service; (b) criminal, dishonest, infamous, or notoriously disgraceful conduct; (c) intentional false statement or fraud in examination or appointment; (d) habitual use of intoxicating beverages to excess; (e) abuse of narcotics, drugs, or other controlled substances;(f) membership or sponsorship in organizations which adversely affect the confidence of the public in the integrity of, or reflecting unfavorably in a public forum on, any ISS Partner, Partner State or Cooperating Agency.”

Well, (b) would certainly exclude Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, (c) would get Mr. Clinton again, and (d) would exclude Kennedy and a goodly proportion of the Congress.

But as Keith also points out, (f) is the most disturbing. It would, as he says, potentially preclude his being allowed to go. And perhaps me…