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Commercial Spaceflight 2

Published June 19th, 2007 in space exploration. 12 Comments

Well, gosh. My post last week on “Commercial Spaceflight” generated a lot of interesting comments. Thanks to Jeff, Clark, Colin, Ferris, and a few others for thought-provoking inputs. This post is not for them (well, it is a little, but I know that you’ll be able to handle it).

When a community of people becomes too intellectually inbred, it produces brain children with birth defects. My sense, after reading the more strident comments on my post is that the small community of space commerce fans needs some fresh blood really badly.

They also need to take a moment out to think back over their own history. Remember MirCorp? They were going to take over the rickety old Russian Mir space station and turn it into a money-making venture. Of course, this made no sense at all, but anyone who pointed this out was pilloried. In the end, it failed. They blamed NASA and moved on to the next fad.

I found it interesting, too, that the most suspect space ventures impressed some of them the most. They didn’t seem excited by the start-up companies that have found a niche and profited; for example, Malin Space Science Systems, which builds imagers for NASA’s robotic spacecraft. In fact, they didn’t even mention them.

There was also the matter of the EADS announcement. EADS is a big European aerospace consortium. One fellow posted a press release about how they plan to build a suborbital aircraft for tourists. He made out like this made nonsense of my arguments. Other jumped on that bandwagon as well.

The fact is, though, that the EADS announcement creates problems for the U.S. start-up companies that say they want to launch tourists on suborbital flights. EADS has relatively deep pockets, and the start-ups don’t. One failure could easily kill a start-up space tourism company. Extensive testing is unlikely, since tests cost money and generate limited revenue.

Some of the people who commented on my post seemed to think that droves of wealthy space tourists would gladly pay big bucks to do a 45-minute joyride in a barely proven spacecraft. Maybe so, but I’d be willing to bet that they’d prefer to fly a spacecraft that has been built and extensively tested by a consortium with a proven track record.

Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShip One won the X-Prize, may understand this; he was quick to criticize the EADS plan on technical grounds.

Frankly, it’s too early to say whether the EADS thing will work out. Even if no tourists fly, it might have some military uses, which would position EADS for contracts in the future. We’ll have to wait to see how it all plays out.

But never mind. What I really want to talk about here today is ideology. You see, the start-up space companies are supposed to do an end run around stodgy old NASA and open the universe to settlement. It’s about rugged individualists thumbing their noses at the vast Federal bureaucracy, striking out for the frontier, and striking it rich.

I’m sympathetic to visions of space settlement, as you can see if you bother to read my post “Saving Spaceflight.” However, I’m realistic about it. I recognize that it has to grow from what exists, and that, no matter how much I want it, it’s conceivable that it simply won’t be possible. And I don’t blame anyone for that. It could just be reality.

Space doesn’t care whether you are enthusiastic about a given vision for spaceflight or not. Space is a vast, inhospitable place, utterly different from any environment where people have lived before. It’s not the U.S. West. We are not evolved to live there. We don’t know whether people can live there indefinitely.

We do know that on average people in space lose bone mass at a rate of about 1% a month. We also know that about half the people who go into space spend up to a week being ill before their bodies acclimate, then become ill again upon returning to Earth. Sounds like a great vacation.

There’s also the issue of radiation. There’s a lot of it in space. Apollo astronauts regularly saw flashes caused by heavy particles shooting through the aqueous humor in their eyeballs. Astronauts on Mir went through laptops at a prodigious rate because radiation fried them. Astronauts are classified as radiation workers, and are only allowed a certain career dose. It’s not unlikely that a single six-month stay on the moon could subject an astronaut to enough radiation that they would be permanently grounded when they returned to Earth.

I suspect that we can find solutions for all of these problems, but the fact is that we haven’t yet, and there are no guarantees. The number of people who’ve lived in space more than about six months at a time can be counted on your fingers and toes, and not all of those long-term flagpole sitters collected good data on what space was doing to them during their stay in orbit.

Before you accuse me of lying or not doing my homework, I suggest that you do some reading, and not just in the literature of the faith. Dig up some serious papers. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but educating yourself is important when you want to make something happen. Space is not a religion, where you receive the holy writ and stop thinking. It’s also not science fiction. It’s a set of complex technical, economic, medical, political, and cultural problems.

One of the cultural problems we space supporters face is declining U.S. educational standards. The vast majority of Americans are hard-pressed to name the nearest planet or describe the Van Allen belts or say what the moon is made of. One reason I write for Earth & Sky is that I’d like to try to change that.

This, at root, is why I think that “NewSpace” will fail - because many of its adherents (including some who have made big investments) don’t have a good grip on the problems. They want to believe, so they do. I believe that such people are not in fact interested in space much at all. If they were, they’d understand the daunting range of problems they face better than they do.

Commercial spaceflight

Published June 12th, 2007 in space exploration. 94 Comments

In some ways, I’m a tremendous optimist when it comes to spaceflight. I believe, for example, that it should be possible to launch an automated probe to another star within the next 50 years. In other ways, I’m quite pessimistic. I believe, for example, that the current hoo-hah over space tourism and other new forms of space “commerce” (sometimes called Newspace) is not going to be around much longer.

I think that the odds are against it mainly because piloted spaceflight is expensive and difficult. I think that it’s inevitable that, assuming any tourist spacecraft are built, one will fail early on and kill its wealthy passengers. When it does, the fledgling industry will die. A space voyage to low-Earth orbit would be a joyride, not something anyone needs to do. If it becomes recognized that there is a high probability that people will die, then few will want to make the trip. For that matter, when the word gets out that half the people who travel into space spend a week or more being sick, it will discourage many potential customers.

Newspace people like to use the early days of aviation as an analogy, but it doesn’t make sense. Aviation worked because it provided a better way of accomplishing something people wanted done; that is, traveling quickly to and from cities and countries where they had business. Tourist spaceflight won’t do anything similar any time soon.

I separate tourist flights by start-up space companies from tourist flights on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which have built up a respectable safety record in 40 years of flight. Soyuz spacecraft have three seats and need only two cosmonauts to fly. Through American agents, the cash-strapped Russians have sold the Soyuz third seat several times. This is not too different from politically motivated guest-cosmonaut flights of the 1970s and 1980s, which saw passengers from Bulgaria, Vietnam, Syria, France, Japan, Britain, and other countries riding to Soviets space stations in the third seat. Both served Russian interests.

I’m all for people trying to make a buck. I do have a problem, however, with Newspace people who say NASA should “get out of the way.” NASA is not in their way; the realities of spaceflight and economics are.

I also think that it’s ludicrous when Newspace people want NASA to give them taxpayers’ dollars. This amounts to a subsidy for an activity that’s not in the national interest. Sometimes Newspace companies seem to me like hobby clubs for wealthy people who don’t understand the difficulties of spaceflight or for retired NASA and aerospace industry managers who want to keep busy. I don’t think taxpayers should be called upon to subsidize such a hobby, any more than they should be called upon to subsidize model railroading, knitting, or beer can collecting.

Newspace and the 1970s space colony craze share some features. Folks swept up in the latter wanted to build cities in space at the libration points; the L5 point was particularly attractive to them. “L5 in 1995″ was one of their slogans. This was, of course, unrealistic, though at the time a good many people became very excited about it, and very disdainful if one dared point out that their dream was full of holes. Eventually the dream died, and now some of the same people have taken up Newspace as their new perforated dream.

I especially take umbrage when Newspace people want NASA to give them the money it spends on scientific exploration. Exploration is what space is all about. Solving exploration problems drives technology development. Much more important than that, but harder to quantify, learning new things about the universe is rarely a waste of time. It’s certainly more important than subsidizing a doomed dream.

28 new worlds - not!

Published May 30th, 2007 in astronomy and extrasolar planets. 5 Comments

Yesterday I wrote that the California & Carnegie Planet Search had announced on Monday that they found 28 new planets around other stars. It turns out that only five of the 28 are actual new discoveries. The Monday announcement was really a review of California & Carnegie Planet Search discoveries announced over the past year. (Thanks to Gerald Nordley for pointing this out.)

News media around the world made the same mistake (for example, here, here, and here). The California & Carnegie Planet Search press release on the Monday announcement seems to have generated the confusion.

The headlines should have read, “Team Announces Five New Planets.” Of course, if the news media knew that “only” five new planets had been found, we might not have seen any headlines.

I think that this goof is an indictment not only of press release writers and science reporters, but also of the way astronomers refer to the planets they find orbiting other stars. Few people can recognize the arcane alphanumeric designations they use. We need to start giving these worlds real names. If we did, these planets would become distinct, recognizable worlds, not mere interchangable sets of letters and numbers.

As I reported yesterday, the California & Carnegie team also found seven brown dwarfs - objects too massive to be planets but not massive enough to be a stars - and two objects that might be very light brown dwarfs or very heavy planets.

The 28 planets they discovered this past year probably resemble Jupiter: massive, stormy balls of gas and liquid. Some orbit their stars closer than Mercury orbits the Sun. Two orbit farther from their stars than does Jupiter. Five or six orbit their stars at about the distance Earth orbits the Sun. It’s possible that a large moon of a Jupiter-type planet orbiting a Sun-like star at about Earth’s distance could be habitable. Think Endor, the Ewok-infested moon in Episode VI of the Star Wars saga.

Special places

Published May 26th, 2007 in Earth. 2 Comments

What do Machu Picchu, L’Anse aux Meadows, Hadrian’s Wall, Lady Liberty, Victoria Falls, Mesa Verde, Brugge’s old heart, Macquarie Island, the Ming and Qing Imperial Tombs, Timbuktu, and the Grand Canyon have in common?

They’re all on the UNESCO World Heritage List, that’s what. In all, the List includes 830 unique sites.

Which have you explored?

What if dinosaurs still ruled the Earth?

Published May 17th, 2007 in asteroids and dinosaurs. 5 Comments

I’m preoccupied with finishing the manuscript of the second edition of Humans to Mars, so here’s another brief pointer to one of my favorite websites.

The Speculative Dinosaur Project is rollicking great fun, not least because its participants don’t take themselves too seriously. It seeks to answer the question in the post title above. On Specworld (as they call their dinosaur-populated Earth), the asteroid that punched a 300-kilometer hole in the Yucatan 65 milion years ago missed. Dinosaurs and their contemporaries went “whew!” and got on with the serious business of evolving into weird and wonderful new species.

Alas, the site hasn’t been updated lately. But never mind, there’s still plenty to explore.

Carfree cities

Published May 16th, 2007 in carfree and sustainability. 10 Comments

I’m a big fan of J. H. Crawford’s book Carfree Cities and the website that goes with it. Crawford updated his online newsletter Carfree Times this past Monday, and it’s worth a look.

Andromeda, the Milky Way, and you

Published May 14th, 2007 in deep future and science. 3 Comments

Enjoy the Milky Way while you can. Our home galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy are the main members of the Local Group of galaxies; you can think of them as the anchor stores of the Local Group mall. Unlike Sears and JCPenney, however, our galaxy and Andromeda are moving closer all the time. In a couple of billion years, they’ll begin to interact gravitationally, then they’ll collide. Now they’re classic spiral galaxies; five billion years from now, they’ll merge into a single big elliptical galaxy.

Five billion years is a very long time, but our Sun and Earth will still exist. The Sun will be in its red giant phase, and Earth will be a scorched cinder packed full of fossils.

T. J. Cox and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have calculated what will happen to our Sun when Andromeda and the Milky Way collide. They found that the Sun will move outward until it orbits about 100,000 light-years from the heart of the new elliptical galaxy. We orbit about 30,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way today.

The dreadful thing about this not that we’ll be moving to a new neighborhood. Rather, it’s that the silvery band of the Milky Way that we see in dark night skies will not survive. We see that hazy band because the Milky Way is a flat spiral and we’re within it. When you look up at the Milky Way’s hazy band, you are looking through the dense plane of our galaxy. Starting two billion years from now, that lovely band will blur and vanish as Andromeda’s gravity stirs up the Milky Way’s 100 billion stars.

So get out under a dark sky and view the Milky Way while you still have the chance.

POPclocks

Published May 14th, 2007 in sustainability. 6 Comments

Never mind going to see the latest horror flick at the cineplex - if you want to scare yourself, check out the U.S. Census Bureau’s U.S. and World Population Clocks website.

The U.S. adds a new person every 11 seconds. The world adds a new person every 2.5 seconds. My grandfather was born nearly a century ago into a world with about 1.5 billion people. He’s still alive. I was born nearly half a century ago into a world with a little more than three billion people. My daughter was born in 2003, into a world with just over six billion people. That’s about a four-fold increase in a bit less than a century - a long human lifetime.

The good news is, our rate of growth is already slowing down. Whereas the period 1960-2000 saw us double our numbers, the period 2000-2050 is likely to see “only” about a 50% increase, to nine billion. This slowdown is happening mainly because people are having fewer kids.

If we’re lucky, then that will continue to be the main reason that our population growth rate slows. If we’re unlucky, then environmental factors will take over. The combination of climate change and increasing numbers packs much potential for human misery in the decades ahead.

Saving spaceflight

Published May 8th, 2007 in moon, space exploration, Mars and science. 29 Comments

Every so often I become worried about whether we’ll have a future in space. Right now my thoughts run this way because we’re sacrificing so much to go boldly where we went 40 years ago.

The robotic Mars exploration program has been truncated, the Terrestrial Planet Finder and Europa Orbiter have been cancelled, work to expand the International Space Station has halted, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts has been shut down, and the list goes on and on. All because this President says that we should send humans to the moon again for no really obvious reason.

The moon program will go away soon. It’s already limping because Bush hasn’t actually requested from Congress the cash he promised NASA when he announced his “Vision for Space Exploration” in January 2004. It seems unlikely that the programs scrapped to make up for those missing funds will be revived immediately, however. There’s the little matter of a trillion-dollar deficit fueled by ill-advised tax cuts and the monstrous Iraq debacle.

After Bush, after the Vision for Space Exploration, after the restoration of fiscal responsibility - what then for spaceflight?

I want to see a human-robotics partnership. It’s an old concept, and it was making serious in-roads into NASA’s thinking before the Bush Vision. It boils down to using astronauts when it makes sense, and using robots when it makes sense. By “makes sense,” I mean when the benefits outweigh the costs. The tricky part of this is that using astronauts only occasionally makes sense, and that alarms some powerful political players.

There are several reasons why using astronauts only makes sense occasionally. For one thing, there’s the financial cost. Piloted spaceflight is expensive. It’s tough to come up with anything that astronauts can do that justifies the cost of doing it.

There’s also the risk. Every piloted spaceflight is dangerous. Piloted spaceflight is not routine. Every piloted spacecraft can fail in many, many ways. People routinely do dangerous things - for example, smoking cigarettes and neglecting sunblock. When it comes to spaceflight, however, there’s a lot of risk aversion. Americans don’t want their astronauts to die to conduct obscure experiments.

Robots are relatively cheap. Take Opportunity and Spirit, for example. The twin Mars Exploration Rovers have been at work on Mars since early 2004. They cost less than one Shuttle flight.

Risk means something different for robots. No one wants to see $500-million robotic spacecraft fail, but if one does, no one dies.

Now, before you accuse me of being anti-astronaut, let me say that I think people belong in space. Eventually, people will settle the Solar System. I think that it’s inevitable.

Astronauts have vital roles to play in space. Their chief role right now is to serve as laboratory subjects in Earth orbit. That’s not dramatic, but it’s a duty that this generation of astronauts has to future generations. We need more data on how people operate in space so that we can design countermeasures. We did not evolve to live in space, so we have to use our brains to adapt to it, and we can’t do that unless we understand the problems we face.

Though it’s commonly assumed that people can settle the moon and Mars, the fact is that we don’t know if people can survive for long periods in moon or Mars gravity. The moon and Mars are smaller and less massive than Earth. Lunar surface gravity is only one-sixth strong as Earth surface gravity. Martian gravity is only one-third as strong. Is the moon’s gravity strong enough to stop the bone loss that plagues astronauts in weightlessness? Is Mars’ gravity enough?

It might be a good idea to build a space station in Earth orbit that can rotate at different speeds, enabling it to simulate different levels of gravity. Such a station might serve as a prototype for a rotating spaceship for eventual piloted missions to Mars. In the meantime, a centrifuge module for the International Space Station might be a good idea. (Such a module was another victim of Bush’s Vision.)

In a human-robotic partnership, robots could support human exploration missions. They could scout out landing sites, test new technologies for piloted spacecraft, assemble habitats, pre-deploy equipment, locate resources such as water, relieve humans of the need to perform dull routine maintenance, tote equipment for exploring humans (like a pack mule), and venture into places too risky for humans - for example, into deep crevasses and caves where traces of martian life might persist.

They could also be used to ensure that humans do not contaminate other worlds. Space suits inevitably leak, spraying moisture and microbes in all directions. The first piloted mission to Mars might see astronauts remain in Mars orbit on board a spacecraft revolving to provide Mars gravity. The astronauts would study their own bodies’ reactions to Mars gravity while they remote-controlled biologically clean robots operating on Mars. Using the robots, astronauts could collect uncontaminated samples and launch them to their spacecraft in orbit for immediate analysis. Missions similar to this were first proposed in the 1960s.

Remote control is just one way that humans could support their robot partners. They could also repair damaged robots and upgrade systems on especially valuable and costly robotic spacecraft. The Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions are the prototype for this form of support.

If NASA wholeheartedly embraced the concept of a human-robotic partnership as the basis for its programs, then the number of piloted missions might shrink to one or two per year. The funding freed up could be applied to more and better robotic science missions. Robots could then reveal many new wonders. Freed-up funding could also be applied to the development of advanced technologies that would reduce the cost and risk of piloted missions.

I suspect that, after a time, people would no longer be satisfied to see robots do all the exploring. At some point, the decision would be made to send humans in their wake. By then, we would understand human reactions to the space environment. By then, new space technologies tested during robotic missions would be ready to make piloted missions easier and safer. By then, we’d know how astronauts could best contribute to the further exploration of the Solar System.

It’s possible that, by then, we’d be ready to send humans to other worlds to settle indefinitely, not merely to improve on the exploration capabilities of robots. Since humans first left Africa, most exploration has really been settlement. Robots could set up living places for settler-explorers. Together, robots and humans could open the door to the most exciting form of exploration of all - the exploration of the alternatives new environments create for human societies.

Hayabusa is coming home

Published April 28th, 2007 in asteroids and space exploration. 2 Comments

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on April 25 that Hayabusa (formerly called MUSES-C) has begun its long-delayed return to Earth. Though the spacecraft still has a long voyage ahead of it - it won’t reach Earth until June 2010 - JAXA engineers and flight controllers deserve praise for reaching this milestone. Through heroic efforts, they pulled the wounded spacecraft back from the brink.

Hayabusa - the name means “peregrine falcon” - left Earth on May 9, 2003. The spacecraft began to suffer malfunctions in July 2005, when one of three reaction wheels - used for orienting Hayabusa without using fuel - stopped spinning. Nevertheless, the 510-kilogram spacecraft arrived successfully at Itokawa, a bean-shaped near-Earth asteroid just half a kilometer long, on September 12, 2005.

A second reaction wheel failed early in October, forcing JAXA controllers to turn the spacecraft using small thruster rockets. In November 2005, after mapping Itokawa and studying its composition, Hayabusa released a small lander called MINERVA, but it missed the asteroid and was lost in space.

Hayabusa landed on Itokawa on November 19 to grab a sample, but its sample collection system did not operate. JAXA believes that a second landing on November 25 managed to collect a sample of dust, even though the collection system may again have failed to operate.

Then Hayabusa’s real troubles began. The spacecraft’s steering thruster system began to leak. The leak acted as a thruster, nudging Hayabusa in random directions. The spacecraft turned its solar panels away from the Sun and began to lose power. Because it could not reliably point its antenna, it broke radio contact with Earth on November 25. The radio link was restored by November 30, but Hayabusa continued to drift. An attempt to use the thrusters on December 2 failed.

Fortunately, Hayabusa has two propulsion systems. In addition to the balky steering thrusters, which use chemical fuel, it has four electric thrusters. Electric propulsion is the wave of the future. Electric thrusters typically use very little propellant and produce very little thrust, but can operate continuously for months.

Hayabusa was launched from Earth on a rocket too weak to send it directly to Itokawa. After the rocket pushed it out of Earth orbit and separated, controllers activated Hayabusa’s electric thrusters, which use the heavy gas xenon as fuel. The thrusters gradually changed Hayabusa’s course and speed over more than a year so that it could intercept Itokawa. This tactic saved tons of chemical fuel and millions of yen.

On December 4, desperate JAXA controllers commanded Hayabusa’s electric propulsion system to vent xenon gas into space. This acted as a makeshift thruster and slowed the spacecraft’s spin. Then, on December 8, Hayabusa suffered another sudden change of orientation and broke radio contact with Earth.

By then, however, controllers understood Hayabusa’s motion. They predicted that the spacecraft would stabilize and rotate enough that radio contact could be restored in about two months. On January 23, 2006, they detected Hayabusa’s radio beacon, and on February 6 they vented more xenon. On March 7, JAXA announced that it had restored contact with the spacecraft.

Controllers then checked out Hayabusa’s systems. Two of the electric thrusters had failed, as had four of Hayabusa’s 11 batteries. Nevertheless, JAXA engineers remained hopeful that controllers could begin Hayabusa’s return to Earth when an Earth-return opportunity occurred in April 2007. Now the Hayabusa team’s hard work, patience, and ingenuity have paid off.

Hayabusa’s recovery is a triumph for spacefaring humankind. Even if it retrieved no sample, the experience gained through this “near-death experience” will be applied to future space exploration missions. If Hayabusa did collect a sample of Itokawa, and if it succeeds in reaching Earth as planned, then the mission will be a scientific triumph, too.

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