Space FTW

I admit there are a number of things that disturb me about the Chinese space program: its opacity, its connections to the Chinese military, its use of technology not necessarily obtained in an above-board manner. However, I love it for one specific reason: it presents a delightful boogeyman for those American politicians susceptible to the need for a boogeyman. These are politicians usually very unlikely to push for funding for NASA or any space-related effort at all. They are uninterested in progress, unless it lines their pockets, and certainly uninterested in science, engineering, or human achievement. Spirit of Exploration? Advancement of the Frontier? Progress? Ha. To these people, that comes from bailing out banks.

Yet present them with the spectre of some “foreign power” owning orbit and the military high ground, or possessing (gasp) a technological advantage, and most of them line right up to complain that NASA isn’t doing its job and express anger about the lack of a U.S. manned launch capability right now, and so on and so forth. Most of these same reactionary political geniuses, of course, think that spending literally stupid amounts of national treasure to reverse recent policy decisions and de-mothball the aged Shuttle fleet should be the solution to these fears… but I digress.

The good news here of course is that China has apparently successfully (that opacity again) orbited Tiangong-1, a small manned orbital laboratory, and intended to be the precursor in a program which will soon have the Chinese with their own 60-ton space station, a fine goal for any spacefaring nation. Let it be noted that they worked to construct this capability because we rejected their participation in our International Space Station program (that paranoia about military involvement again) – possibly also out of concerns regarding misappropriated technology…. Well, although they are “only” now on the level of 1973′s Skylab (or similar Salyut or Almaz stations), what again have we really done ourselves in terms of manned astronautics since then? They too could build a reusable system like we’ve spent the last 30 years playing with if they like, probably by renting a rusting Buran from Russia to examine for a month. Frankly, I expect them to be wiser, building on their existing capabilities, and avoiding that dead-end. Good for them!

A few years ago, China was accomplishing things the Soviets and Americans accomplished in the 60′s. Everyone except the alarmists yawned. Today they accomplished something done in the 70′s. We’re failing right now to duplicate our own accomplishments of the 60′s and 70′s, such as lunar missions, of course. Since our manned space capabilities have varied little since the 80′s, the Chinese program will match or exceed the U.S. program imminently. Very soon, we can expect they will show themselves perfectly capable of carrying the torch further than we ever have. In many ways, this is a good thing.

China’s advancing capabilities should be a cause for celebration for the human race (again, if it weren’t for those little quibbles of mine). But with technological jobs, new resources, and an expanding frontier as the carrot for recalcitrant American politicians, the Chinese push into space does make a lovely stick.

How about that funding for building NASA’s proposed SLS launcher, Congressmen? Perhaps even a fast-track budget?

Psst: Boo!

I’d been wondering when some news would be available on any heavy-lift project out of NASA, since (A) that’s what I think we need and (B) it IS what was asked of NASA when Constellation was shut down.  Apparently the answer is “now”.

I just caught a lightweight article on what is being called the SLS “Space Launch System” (pretty un-creative, but I hardly care if it’s actually built).  It’s a lot of Shuttle-derived technology, which concerns me, but no doubt it keeps a lot of established NASA contractors happy.  It will mount Lockheed Orion capsules, which is a good thing, because the price tag for the capsule is already mainly paid.  I’d have been disgusted if SLS didn’t use Orion.

Apparently it will use five Shuttle main engines in a pod, along with two of the 5-segment boosters planned for the Ares V.  Nothing about this is surprising.  I just hope the price tag isn’t something that will get it cancelled by the current or the next administration, and that costs don’t overrun, which for decades has seemed to be the real problem with NASA (and its contractors).

We need this heavy-lift vehicle, if we’re going to accomplish nearly anything.  I’ll be looking for test launch schedules, but they’re sure to be so unambitious as to depress.

On a brighter note, I understand there will be another SpaceX launch to watch in about two months.  Here’s hoping that goes well.

UPDATE:  I found an article with more details on space.com . Apparently the price tag is US$10 billion. Ouch. And launches are expected to begin in 2017. I have started thinking of launch and encounter dates in terms of my son’s age instead of my own – he’ll be eleven then.

Frankly, I will be pleasantly surprised if there’s a launch of SLS earlier than 2019, because that’s just how NASA has worked since I was an eleven-year-old myself.

UPDATE 2: Just spotted another article which suggests the SpaceX shot of Dragon in November is likely to be delayed, because the ISS crew on orbit at that time will not be the individuals trained previously in working with Dragon. This personnel issue would be due to the Soyuz launch issues that currently prevent launch of the next crew rotation. Not good.

I’ll admit this one caught me by surprise. I last looked into Juno’s status more than a year ago, then forgot about it. NASA moves at such a crawl that it’s easy to lose track of when any mission is actually due to reach a milestone.

So Juno finally launched today, 5 August as I draft this. Cause for celebration indeed, as we’ve had nothing operational near Jupiter since 2003, when the Galileo mission was terminated by sending it into the planet. Galileo, you’ll remember did a remarkable job though it was half-crippled by the failure of its main antenna. Let’s hope that Juno has no such issues, and we get more useful science from it, as rapidly as possible when it arrives in 2016.

However, I worry a bit about how effective Juno will be, because in the “things that make you say ‘hunh’” department, it runs on solar power. Some parties are excited because this will be the furthest from the sun we’ve ever operated a solar-powered spacecraft. Apparently solar panel technology was pushed a bit by the design of the cells powering Juno. Well, that’s great, and I’m a proponent of solar, having a 3.4kW array on the roof of my own house. However, I am not a proponent of starving outer system missions for energy.

I suppose NASA and others wanted to avoid the public relations mess we saw when Cassini launched with radiothermal generators (RTGs, not even a powerplant), and the Very Green Fringe pitched a fit about “what if the rocket fails on launch?” Unfortunately, we’re never going to get anywhere with regard to really effective space missions unless we bite the bullet and start launching the kind of pocket reactors we’re already using on submarines. For that, we need both some spine and some better heavy-lift vehicles. I’m seeing more signs of the latter, but not the former. Those reactors (not piddly little RTGs) are what it’s going to take to use the serious ion drive propulsion we’re developing, which in turn will eliminate part of the long waits we have between launch and arrival, and the technical obsolescence of probes even before they reach their targets.

At any rate, Juno finally launching is still good news. We can look forward to some current-technology (nearly) data transmission from Jupiter within about a year of New Horizons reaching Pluto, making 2015-2016 hopefully some very fun years indeed for planetary science.

Paul Gilster over at Centauri Dreams is reporting on some fantastic photos and movies assembled from the Dawn data stream. Dawn will be in closer orbit later this year, but the pictures it is returning of Vesta are extremely beautiful.

Check the specific Vesta post here.

What with the lead-up to the final landing of Atlantis today, and the wind-down of the Shuttle program over the last couple of years, I’ve been reading a ton of lamentation from a lot of people about how ‘America is losing (or giving up) the space race’ and how this is just terrible.

Well, baloney.

The Shuttle has been a wonderful machine, true. However, I beg to dispute that it was such an awesome move for America and the world in general to have the best manned spaceship confined to LEO since 1981. Come on, people, figure this out. In 1969, at the height of Apollo’s successes, people were talking about being on Mars by 1981. It wasn’t even unreasonable.

With all due respect to all the excellent engineers that made the amazing Shuttle program work, I and many others assert that the Shuttle really has not been that great for us. It’s true that NASA did work to modernize the vehicles, but the truth of the matter is that they largely use technology approved for flight in the 1970′s. To get approved for flight by NASA, that had to be tried-and-true stuff. Older stuff. For the 1970′s.

What year is it? Oh, 2011. Where’s my hoverboard and my flying car, then? Ah, I see. NASA has been flying the 1970′s-tech Shuttle round and round instead of making that other stuff for us. I’m being somewhat facetious here, but I trust you get my point. Besides, NASA only has had so much cash to throw around, and a heck of a lot of it has gone toward operating the Shuttles.

Let’s look at it from another angle. The Shuttle is a tool for hauling cargo and people to LEO. One big argument about the Shuttle’s safety failures is that its design is fundamentally flawed, literally because the Shuttle does both of those things at once – it hauls cargo and people. It should be obvious that we could launch people and cargo separately. We’ve known how to do this since the 1960′s or 70′s. Hm. Seeing a trend here.

NASA even agreed that one big solution toward this design problem would be to make a new manned space launch system that delivered people and cargo to orbit separately. They (and many contractors) have spent years working on this now. They were going to make two vehicles, one little one to launch people, and one big one to launch cargo – and a lot more cargo than the Shuttle can take up at a time. Seems like a good thing, no?

Of course, I’m talking about Constellation. Ares I to launch astronauts and Ares V to do heavy-lift cargo launch. Your crew meets the cargo in orbit, uses some of the good things we have learned and practiced flying Shuttles to spacewalk to it or dock with it, assemble if necessary, prep it, and use it. Good. Great. Let’s do this.

Oh, except the price tag for Ares is nuts. Crazy talk, even for Washington. Let’s pretend for just a minute that we don’t already spend about fifty times that every year on defense, probably more. It turns out that the price tag is crazy for science and research, but not if it’s for guns. I sound pretty liberal here, which is more funny than you know. See, the trick is that if you do your research and your science, and are really good at them, you don’t need as many guns. A few weapons are sufficient when no one else can compete with the ones you have. America is still riding a wave of tech superiority in the defense area that got going back in the 50′s and 60′s. This was good, but it’s ending. We changed how wars are fought in the world because we out-teched everyone so severely that it just became unreasonable for anyone to think about fighting America. And we trashed the Soviet Union’s economy, winning the Cold War at the same time, just because they tried to keep up. Yay.

We’re all grumpy and sad now because the old Soviet space launch technology (Soyuz) is still up and running, and because we’re blowing tons of national treasure on fighting asymmetric wars that our great technology doesn’t help as much with. Well, we need to get over that and get to work on more technology that will help with what we’re doing today. The Russians can still get to space right now because they refined a 60′s-era launch system and stuck with it. We made a shiny, expensive Shuttle, and just like the family car and its gas, it turns out to be pretty expensive to operate.

Let’s get back to Ares, and the point. Ares-I-X was launched after a few years of work. This was a suborbital test flight. It mostly worked. Dandy.

The Ares-I-X launch cost somewhat over US$440 million. The Augustine commission estimated that to get Ares I fully flight-ready would be US$5 billion. And that’s why Congress and others have rightly balked.

There’s a great deal that can be said about the bloat and waste and huge costs in the military-industrial complex that builds our defense equipment and our spaceships. Others have said it better, and if anyone pokes around the web for a few minutes, it’s easy to find reliable sources that list some of the costs and pull back the carpet on some of the waste.

The short version is that cancelling the Ares launch vehicles wasn’t stupid. Shutting down the expensive and aging, and increasingly dangerous Shuttles wasn’t stupid either. Come on, this is a spaceship that has killed fourteen of the best and brightest Americans. Callous? Maybe. It’s also a spaceship that can’t launch in the rain. Think about that.

I hear it rains in Florida a bit. I leave as an exercise for the reader to estimate the cost of a Shuttle launch scrub. Betcha you can find it on the web if you try.

Digression – the Shuttle was supposed to launch either from Canaveral in Florida or Vandenberg in California. I’m pretty sure it’s sunnier around Vandenberg more often. Oh, but it cost too much to maintain both launch sites….

So, yes. Farewell, Shuttle. End of an Era and so forth. I have shed my tears, too. I used to sit in my jammies as a kid and watch them launch in the 80′s. I was home with the flu but watching Live when Challenger went up for the last time, and came down in pieces. I still felt good every time I caught on the news that one of the great big birds had made re-entry and touched down safely (even more so after Columbia didn’t). It’s over, and they’re museum pieces now.

Finally I come to the point that all the lamentation is about: “Now what?” Especially for those of us who want to see humanity doing more in space, not less, this is a very pertinent question. X-33 SSTO didn’t happen. Constellation is canned. Visionary and hopeful people are upset. It feels like we’re slipping backward, going the wrong way, away from our dreams.

Phooey. Shed the tears we may and should, but this is the best darn thing that has happened to the U.S. manned space program since Apollo. NASA is getting out of the space launch business. Good, because they were totally wasting bucketloads of our money doing it. We’ll contract our launches to lean, mean, and effective companies who can get the job done.

Let’s trot out the cost of the Ares-I-X launch again: US$440 million plus. SpaceX in Hawthorne, California has designed, developed, and constructed a launch site for their Falcon 9 rocket program and two vehicles. Both of those vehicles successfully launched to orbit. Ares-I-X, may I remind you, was suborbital. SpaceX claims to have accomplished this for about the same cost as just the launch tower segment of the Ares-I-X price tag. They’re saying it pretty loudly and pretty often, and they deserve to. They can get to space faster and cheaper than the old boys, and they’ve proved it. Why is it not abundantly clear to everyone that SpaceX and companies like them (“commercial space”) are the right way to go now?

SpaceX has been awarded a NASA contract for launches to the ISS. Sure, there will be problems. Sure, there will be pitfalls. Sure, there will inevitably be accidents. Fatal ones.

That didn’t stop Apollo, and it didn’t stop the Shuttle (though one could argue the loss of Columbia actually did, setting in motion the process that brought us to where we are today – NASA has become cautious since Apollo: I call those risk-adverse bureaucrats a bunch of wimps – the astronauts still want to fly, let them get the safety issues straight with the engineers, and keep the politicians out of it). The point is that if we’re still willing to pay those non-financial prices, we might as well be using a more effective system that’s much cheaper to operate!

And so far, SpaceX has shown they can put their Dragon capsule in orbit with Falcon 9. If you still don’t want to trust a new-generation company like SpaceX, then look at least to Boeing, whose modern CST-100 capsule is being developed right now to compete with SpaceX’s Dragon. Lockheed is sticking with the Ares capsule, but planning to get it to orbit on a different rocket. Of course, I’m making no guesses as to when those other two old-guard companies will actually have their hardware launch-ready, or how much of our money they’ll want to spend to do it. The old-guard companies were going to build Ares for NASA, and we’ve talked about part of that price tag. SpaceX is way ahead so far, and could feasibly stay that way, but I’d rather see three working and useful capsules than just one. The Shuttle should have taught us that having only one launch vehicle, capable of only going to one place (LEO/ISS), just isn’t adequate.

With the exit of the Shuttle, we’re on our way to a place where launches are done more cheaply, and that should mean more often (imagine that!). That should mean more gets done on orbit, and that we finally get more of the practice NASA wants us to have before we start trying to do something other than just go round and round about 150 miles up. So dry your eyes. This is the future.

But if NASA waits too long, someone else is going to leave orbit first. The Chinese are who get talked about, but I have another suspect. If SpaceX finds they have the resources on their hands (those things called profits, maybe, which NASA never will or can have), I firmly believe they will not wait for NASA, and then we’ll see how it feels to watch a private company do for millions something that our government said was impossible for billions or even trillions. Something for the history books.

Another time, I’ll talk about why SpaceX is my likely suspect for such a move.