LockMart’s ex-CEO says NASA doesn’t have enough juice to make a go of the Constellation program. Who needs manned spaceflight, anyway?
And USN brass start making nervous sounds about the Navy’s tactical flexibility, in what one presumes is a pre-emptive shot at preserving a slice of the shrinking DoD pie (via Neptunus Lex).
9/9/2009 – WASHINGTON (AFNS) — NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Canadian Space Agency President Steve MacLean signed a framework agreement Wednesday for cooperative activities in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes. Canadian Ambassador to the United States Michael Wilson hosted the signing at the Canadian Embassy in Washington.
…The framework agreement is an important step in an evolving process toward a coordinated and comprehensive approach to exploration and use of outer space. It sets forth general terms and conditions that will be applied to future cooperative projects and facilitates expanded cooperation between the U.S. and Canada on a range of activities related to human spaceflight, exploration, space science and Earth science.
– “U.S. and Canada sign agreement on civil space cooperation.“ Air Force News Service, 09 September 2009.
I don’t get it. It is not as if we could loft orbital death stars even if we wanted to.
Practically speaking anything Canada does in space has to have the tacit approval of the United States or Europe, because Canada has no heavy lift boosters and no launch sites to loft them from. Every single Canadian astronaut and all Canadian satellites over 140kg have ridden to orbit on an American or European booster. To be blunt, if they don’t like the payload, it’s not getting to orbit.
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and NASA recently announced the launch of an environmentally-friendly, safe propellant comprised of aluminum powder and water ice (ALICE)…[Dr. Steven F.] Son noted, “The ALICE propellant can be improved with the addition of oxidizers and become a potential solid rocket propellant on Earth. Away from this planet, on the Moon or Mars, ALICE can be manufactured in those locations instead of being transported at a large cost.”
– Callier, Maria. “AFOSR and NASA Launch First-Ever Test Rocket Fueled by Environmentally-Friendly, Safe Aluminum-Ice Propellant.” Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 20 August 2009.
Given the tiny number of rocket/shuttle launches the planet has to endure every year, I am not worried about them causing polar bears to drown, or starve, or get minimum-wage jobs. But the fact that this propellant’s key components can be found on other worlds, thereby making it possible to manufacture fuel somewhere other than Earth, is kind of exciting. Certainly it will make space exploration cheaper in the long run, as spacecraft will not always have to tanker every last drop of their required fuel from Earth.
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
– John F. Kennedy. Address to William Marsh Rice University, Houston, TX. September 12th, 1962.
Astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin beside solar wind experiment. Mare Tranquillitatis, July 20th, 1969. NASA Archives AS11-40-5873.
Whenever I consider the Apollo missions, it is always with a twinge of sadness and regret. I laud the enormous technical achievement of hundreds of thousands of people, of course, but philosophically it puts me in a melancholy mood. The very last men to walk upon the moon came back home three months before I was born, and no human has been back to the moon since. Sure, we’ve been up to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), but never again have we dared to set foot upon another celestial body.
Imagine if, after a frenzy of activity at the beginning of the 20th century, no human beings ever took flight in a heavier-than-air craft after Capt. John Alcock and Lieut. Arthur Whitten Brown flew their Vickers Vimy bomber non-stop across the Atlantic. You would wonder why we hadn’t continued on to discover new things and develop better aircraft. And of course the convenience and frequency of travel and commerce we experience today would be absent. Entire inventions and industries would not exist. We would never have known the names of Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, Amy Johnson, Charles Kingsford Smith, James Doolittle, Chuck Yeager, Robin Olds, John Boyd, and so on.
And certainly, if we have given up so prematurely, we would have little reason to celebrate this day, and the now-household names of Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin, and Mike Collins. One of the best ways to commemorate this day is to watch the 2006 British documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. It contains no narration, just the voices and contemporary reminiscences of the Apollo astronauts themselves, along with copious amounts of NASA archival footage.
Watching these eleven men talk about their experiences is bittersweet. They all seem like bright and funny guys, their youthful enthusiasm shining through the accumulated wrinkles and years. I cannot help but remember that these men are the last humans alive who remember what it is to walk on an alien world. The fact that there are no men and women of my generation who have such memories seems shameful. If NASA is able to stick to schedule and return to the moon in 2019, by that time our very first lunar visitors will be 89 years old, and some fifty years will have elapsed since their visit.
If we fail to go back, there will soon be no one left alive to answer the skeptics and say, simply, “I was there. This is what it was like.” The only incontrovertible, physical testament to their voyages being the lower stages of their lunar modules, still standing sentry over undisturbed footprints at each landing site.
Whatever you think about anthropogenic global warming or the odds of humanity wiping itself out, the facts are that the Earth cannot be saved. It will be annihilated by its own star in a few billion years. Even if we were to neutralise every earthbound ill—tyranny, war, famine, crime, pollution—our blue-green Eden would still meet its irrevocable end. In that conflagration, every trace of human existence will be snuffed out. There will be no grand, decaying structures left as a tombstone to mark humanity’s grave. There won’t even be a planet; it will be destroyed by the helium fusion and tidal forces of our expanding Sun. Our moon and Apollo landing sites will likewise be destroyed. No one will know the human race ever existed.
The only permanent solution is to achieve interstellar colonisation. After all, every star will eventually run out of fuel, which means every species without interstellar travel has an irrevocable, unalterable best-before date. The smartest long-term investment this species could ever make is the ability to identify and travel to other solar systems and other habitable planets. There is no other way we will survive.
Our first tentative steps occurred forty years ago. Now with the Orion project, we are re-learning and refining the things we first discovered decades ago. Let us hope that manned space exploration continues to move forward now with greater purpose.
Former astronaut Leroy Chiao regales Gizmodo readers with tales of star voyaging. This is probably my favourite bit:
Today, I was going to write about how to do something else in space. But, I changed my mind. Let's back up to the beginning of a mission. What's it like to go through a launch? How does it feel? Are you able to sleep the night before? Do you get scared? What do you eat before?
Steak and eggs. Medium rare and over easy. This is what the first astronauts ate before launch and why not? I remember during one of my launch counts, the ladies were taking our pre-launch breakfast orders, going around the table. I was hearing things like, dry toast. A little yogurt. Cereal. You gotta be kidding me, what kind of pantywaists am I flying with? They got to me and I replied firmly and evenly, "Steak and eggs, medium rare and over easy." Everyone looked at me funny. I stated the obvious. "Hey, we might go out tomorrow and get blown up. I'm going to have steak and eggs!" Immediately, three guys changed their orders to steak and eggs. I was doing all of us a favor, really. You need a hearty breakfast before launch, you're going to be really busy. Yogurt? Come on.
– Leroy Chiao. "Pre-Launch Jitters and Then… Liftoff", Gizmodo, May 6th, 2009.
No kidding. And I say that as one who occasionally enjoys yogurt. But serious times call for serious measures.
A bat that was clinging to space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank during the countdown to launch the STS-119 mission remained with the spacecraft as it cleared the tower, analysts at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center concluded.
Based on images and video, a wildlife expert who provides support to the center said the small creature was a free tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its right shoulder or wrist. The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit.
– Steven Siceloff. “Bat Hung onto Shuttle During Liftoff“, NASA/John F. Kennedy Space Center, Match 17th, 2009.
But oh, what a death. A free-tailed chiroptera, immortalised forever in the annals of spaceflight.
Interestingly, this is not the first attempt by the flying mammals to get into orbit. A previous bat-astronaut landed on the shuttle Columbia during the countdown for STS-90, but aborted his ride-along when the engines ignited. This latest hitchhiker apparently stuck to his mission profile, at least past the launch gantry.
NASA was not able to confirm whether the bat made it into space, or was sloughed off as the shuttle accelerated through supersonic and hypersonic flight on its climb to low earth orbit.
What is clear though, is that on that glorious day of March 15th, 2009, this bat went higher, farther and faster than any other chiroptera. And for a brief moment, he became the greatest bat-pilot anyone had ever seen.
UPDATE:
“In the hours before Discovery’s liftoff, NASA’s Final Inspection Team (called the “ICE team”) investigated whether the creature would pose a risk to the shuttle if its body impacted the orbiter’s sensitive heat shield tiling. Ultimately, NASA officials signed a waiver confirming that the bat was safe to fly with.
“The bat eventually became ‘Interim Problem Report 119V-0080′ after the ICE team finished their walkdown,” the memo said. “Systems Engineering and Integration performed a debris analysis on him and ultimately a Launch Commit Criteria waiver to ICE-01 was written to accept the stowaway.”
This isn’t the first time a bat has attempted to travel into space. Another bat was seen clinging to the side of the external tank attached to the shuttle Endeavour on its STS-72 flight in 1996. That one maybe have been a bit more cautious, though: It flew away to safety right before launch.
Coincidentally, an astronaut aboard that flight, Koichi Wakata of Japan, also flew on Discovery this week, making him the first spaceflyer to share two rides with bats. Discovery’s STS-119 mission is headed to the International Space Station to drop off the final segment of the lab’s backbone truss and set of solar array panels.”
– Clara Moskowitz. “Bat’s fate after shuttle launch appears grim“, MSNBC/Space.com, March 18th, 2009.
Go with God,119V-0080.
Apollo XV CSM Endeavour in lunar orbit, as seen from LM Falcon. August 2nd, 1971.
I have always wondered about the mechanical specifics of how the Apollo command/service module (CSM) and lunar module (LM) docked. Specifically, when you see photos of the CSM pre-docking, it has this spindly, pointy thing (known as the docking probe) poking out the very top (or front) of the capsule. And yet the same area also forms part of the docking tunnel with the LM, allowing the crew to transfer internally between the two spacecraft.
So what happened to the docking probe after docking, when the crew needed to transfer? Did NASA just hire extremely thin contortionist astronauts, who could squeeze by it?
Nope, the probe is a tab too bulky for that. Turns out that the probe is removable, and collapses like an umbrella. The astronauts remove it by hand after the automatic docking latches lock on to the LM and seal the two spacecraft together. Before they undock, they reinstall it.
Through the magic of the internets, the man responsible for the design and development of the docking system, Mr. Ken Bloom, describes the mechanism in a 4-page article here.
Forty years ago today, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders were half-way through a dangerous and epic journey, over 230,000 miles from home. TIME magazine recounts some of the story:
But on Christmas Eve the crew got busy. Settling Apollo 8 into orbit around the moon was a high-wire maneuver that involved turning the ship backward and firing its powerful service propulsion engine for precisely four and a half minutes — an eternity in a business in which barely a breath from a thruster is enough to set a ship spinning off course. The engine burn was designed to slow the spacecraft down just enough to ease it into a lunar orbit without losing so much altitude that it crashed into the moon instead. Orbital mechanics also demanded that the maneuver occur on the dark side of the moon, entirely out of radio contact with Earth. At 68 hours and 58 minutes into their journey, the crew buckled in and vanished around the moon’s far side.
– Jeffrey Kluger. “Remembering Apollo 8, Man’s First Trip to the Moon“, TIME, December 24th, 2008.
This is their iconic television broadcast on December 24th, 1968; a reading of Genesis I 1-10, NKJV.
Some dingdong in Denver claims to have video proof that aliens visited a fellow Colorado resident (hat tip to Darcey at Dust My Broom ). Wonderful. Footage so grainy and indistinct that a convenience store security camera would be ashamed of shooting it.
Here’s the thing, though.
If any such notional aliens existed and actually had visited Earth, my sense is they need more help from us than we need from them.
They have enough smarts to cross interstellar distances, but not enough to invent a camera with a telephoto lens?something humans managed to do back in 1891. No sir, these aliens have to conduct all of their reconnaissance with the Mark I eyeball. Maybe they were wondering why their OnStar system failed to kick in and they needed directions to the nearest mechanic.
They can evade SPACECOM’s tracking radars and penetrate the North American ADIZ easily enough, but they haven’t got the smarts to build a few UAVs that can loiter overhead and collect data. Humans, however, have been sending automated probes to other planets for a few decades before an astronaut ever set foot on another celestial body.
There may well be aliens out there in the galaxy, but I’ve yet to see a UFO claim that conclusively demonstrates remote sensing technology on par with?let alone superior to our own.
RELATED: Popular Mechanics brings the rational smackdown to Stan Romanek’s little video epic.
Like I mentioned above, the thing that sets off my skeptic alarm for any number of alien visitations is that there is no internal consistency or logic to their methods. They operate stealthy craft but have zero concern for humans seeing them out in the open? They can’t, apparently, operate ROVs or UAVs sophisticated enough to keep tabs on us without the guy on the ground being aware that he’s under surveillance? Cripes. We can do that stuff today. And in all of these supposed visits, no alien craft or being has ever left behind equipment, packaging, or any kind of non-terrestrial artifact?
As a thought experiment, imagine how we would react if we discovered a sentient, intelligent but less-technologically-developed species living on a celestial body in this solar system.
Would we immediately race over there with a planetary lander and play peek-a-boo into their homes? Or would we be inclined to park a few surveillance birds in orbit and see what the hell was going on, first? Maybe develop some sort of exo-atmospheric ROV that we could use to fly at high altitude and get higher-resolution images and data, without unnecessarily endangering human (or alien) lives. Spend a few decades observing their world, its environment, its civilisations and their organisation, and what sort of technology they did have. Perhaps try to figure out how to communicate with them, so that when we did get to the planetary lander stage, we wouldn’t be climbing out of the lander, unfurling the flag, and watching astronauts die needlessly. Planetary exploration is not an inexpensive venture; and it really is all about conservation of scarce resources and opportunities in order to maximize the quality of data that you get back.
Now ask yourself why none of these alien visitations demonstrate anything close to that level of forethought and intelligence.
They said whoever challenged him would die.
Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate.
The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way.
He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass.
They called it the sound barrier.
(Just because the prior post reminded me of Sam Shepard, and seeing this movie instantly reverts me to ten years old again.)
Chris Taylor: Funnily enough, they were brand-new to me, too! At least until last night when I acquired a copy of...
Nathan B.: I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues, too. This is an excellent post, Chris, and I also...
Chris Taylor: I like to think my solution satisfies both punitive and restorative aims, and has a couple of... Nathan B.: Brilliant, Chris! I love your suggestion. Chris Taylor: David did a lot of atrocious things, but I think it’s pretty evident that a whole lot of them...
Chris flies a desk for a living but is an aeronautics enthusiast who delights in the Golden Age of Aviation. He admires all the pioneering men and women who travelled the world equipped with only a map, compass, sextant, and the conviction that there was no place they could not reach.
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