60012773
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MarkWhittington writes:
A Tuesday story in Russia Today reports that Russia is moving to retaliate against American and European sanctions over its aggression in the Ukraine by in essence ending most space cooperation with the United States. It will prohibit the use of Russian rocket engines such as the RD-180 and NK-33 to launch military satellites. It is closing down 16 GPS sites in Russian territory. Finally Russia will unilaterally end its participation in the International Space Station project in 2020.
The Obama administration would like to extend space station operations to at least 2024. According to the Financial Times Russia believes that its withdraw from the space station will make this impossible. In effect Russia will have evicted the United States from the orbiting space lab that it provided the lion’s share of money and resources to build and maintain.
59879201
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MarkWhittington writes:
Russian officials are suggesting that there may be private sector involvement in the proposed lunar base being planned for the 2030s. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin noted that possibility in an article published in Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily a few weeks ago
The idea of a lunar return having private sector participation is not unprecedented. Bigelow Aerospace suggested a lunar effort based on the COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems) model. The company has even suggested a system of private property rights on the moon to further commercial lunar development.
Russia is far more welcoming of capitalism than it was during the days of the Soviet Union. However private business is conducted slightly differently in Russia than in the West. It is very often a case of who you know trumping what you can do.
A case in point is the Sochi Olympics, a project that cost the Russian Federation roughly $50 billion, comparable to at least starting a lunar base. USA Today analyzed how Sochi worked, including the corruption, the kickbacks, the slipshod performance, and skimming of funds that characterized the run up to the winter games. Sochi was a private sector project, but only in the sense that would have caused many people to go to jail had it happened in the West,
A Russian lunar base would have far more potential for profit, of both the legitimate and dodgy kind, than the Sochi Olympics. Between resource mining and space tourism, many analysts and business leaders suggest that the moon could be transformed into a money maker. Private companies like Moon Express and Golden Spike have been formed as a bet on that very proposition. It may be only natural that Russia would want to get in on that, though perhaps in its own unique way.
59817539
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MarkWhittington writes:
When appropriators pass spending bills they often include guidance language that stipulate how the money should be spent. The 2015 spending bill for NASA is no exception. According to a Wednesday post on the Space Policy Online blog, the House is trying to provide some guidance on how space exploration money is spent.
Congress has always been skeptical about President Obama’s mission to an asteroid, including the Asteroid Retrieval Mission that would snag a small asteroid and place it in lunar orbit to be visited later by astronauts. That skepticism is reflected in the NASA spending bill. The language stipulates that no money should be spent on the ARM project that would not also be applicable to other destinations, such as the moon, the moons of Mars, and Mars itself.
A proposal called Inspiration Mars, which would send a spacecraft on a flyby mission around both Venus and Mars, found a little bit more favor in the House spending bill. The bill’s language calls for an independent assessment of the scheme, including its feasibility as well as its impact on the Orion/Space Launch System program. The flyby mission was recently endorsed by former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin.
59797031
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MarkWhittington writes:
The concept of a Mars/Venus flyby mission got some institutional support thanks to an oped piece in the Houston Chronicle on Monday. The authors are Mike Griffin, CEO of Schafer Corp., NASA administrator between 2005-2009, and the outgoing president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Jim Albaugh, the president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Integrated Defense Systems, and the incoming president of AIAA. The American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics is one of the oldest and most prestigious aerospace organizations on the planet.
The idea of a flyby of the two planets first was proposed as a flyby of Mars to launch in 2018 using a heavy lift Space Launch System, an Orion spacecraft, and some kind of habitation module to send two astronauts on a trip around the Red Planet. It has been since reworked for a 2021 launch to include Venus as well as Mars. The mission is the brainchild of Dennis Tito and is called Inspiration Mars.
The planetary flyby mission is seen as an alternative to the asteroid capture mission that is currently on NASA’s manifest and is also scheduled to occur in the 2020s. It would test out both spacecraft and human beings on an interplanetary voyage without actually having to land on any planet. The flyby mission is considered challenging and risky, but technically feasible. Because of the alignment of the planets, 2021 provides an opportunity to do the mission that will not come again for a considerable period of time.
59764821
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MarkWhittington writes:
The drive by SpaceX to make the first stage of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle reusable has attracted the attention of both the media and the commercial space world. It recently tested a first stage which “soft landed” successfully in the Atlantic Ocean. However both NASA and the French space agency CNES has cast doubt that this kind of reusability could ever be made practical, according to a Monday story in Aviation Week.
SpaceX is basing its plan on the idea that its Merlin 1D engines have a lifecycle of 40, thus a Falcon 9 first stage could in theory be reused that number of times. The margins built into the rocket allow for the extra weight involved in using landing legs and the extra fuel that will be needed to execute a powered descent. These margins will still allow them to launch substantial payloads to low Earth orbit and a geo transfer orbit.
However, citing their own experience in trying to reuse engines, both NASA and the CNES have suggested that both the technical challenges and the economics mitigate against SpaceX being able to reuse all or part of their rockets. NASA found that it was not worth trying to reuse the space shuttle main engines after every flight without extensive refurbishment. The CNES studied reusing its Ariane 5 solid rocket boosters liquid fueled and reusable but soon scrapped the idea. Safety issues surrounding flyback boosters were also cites as a show stopper
59660331
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MarkWhittington writes:
Chemistry World reported on Friday that a group of European researchers have made a giant step toward inventing a process that will create jet fuel from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. If and when the process can be brought to an industrial scale it could make greenhouse gasses, considered a dire problem by some, into a valuable resource. It might even make jet plane travel carbon neutral.
The idea is that at high temperatures, water and carbon dioxide break apart into hydrogen, carbon monoxide and oxygen. Then hydrogen and carbon monoxide combines to become syngas. Then using the well-known Fischer-Tropsch process can be converted into kerosene or gasoline.
The trick has always been to remove the excess oxygen, which tends to make the syngas more explosive and therefore dangerous. The European researchers have hit upon the idea of using cerium oxide. When heated with concentrated sunlight the cerium oxide released oxygen which is piped out. When the syngas is created, the cerium reacts with carbon dioxide and water to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide, absorbing the excess oxygen. Then the cerium oxide is blasted again with sunlight repeating the cycle.
59660111
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MarkWhittington writes:
When NASA asks for money for its various projects such as the International Space Station, one of the selling points was that the biomedical research that would be conducted in space would lead to cures for various diseases. A Friday story in National Review suggests that the promise may be about to be fulfilled in the form of a cure for diabetes. If so it would be boon to millions of people who suffer from the disease.
Where NASA sponsored research comes into play stems from an experiment that was first flown on the space shuttle Challenger in 1985 that explored the physics involving encapsulation. Dr. Taylor Wang, Ph.D was the payload specialist on that mission who did the research. As a result of that and other microgravity research, a company called Encapsulife has applied for a patent for what would be in effect a diabetes patch. It would be effectively a cure for diabetes.
59265371
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MarkWhittington writes:
While NASA insists that expeditions to the lunar surface are off the table in its exploration roadmap, push back continues from many quarters, including the scientific community. Leonard David mentioned on a post on his blog “Inside Outer Space” that Clive Neal, a Civil Engineering & Geological Sciences professor and lunar expert at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has urged a letter writing campaign to persuade Congress to compel the space agency to put a lunar return back on the space exploration agenda.
58896129
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MarkWhittington writes:
Spaceflight Insider wonders if the Apollo 11 moon landing, which occurred 45 years ago this July, even matters. After all, it did not lead to lunar colonies, as many people at the time had hoped.
Leaving aside all of those technological spinoffs and the science that is even today ongoing, the main reason that Apollo matters is that it demonstrated what was possible if a country sets its mind to it. This is not the hoary old, "If we can land a man on the moon, we can do-" blank. Rather it is how a singular and well understood goal can be achieved.
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of how then Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, upon learning of President Reagan's SDI proposal, called in all of his military and aerospace experts and asked of what Reagan planned to do was possible.
The answer was universally yes, according to the story, because the Americans landed men on the moon and thus could do anything.
The fact that the moon landing happened and with technology that seems like stone knives and bear skins animates the desire to return to the moon, whether it is on the part of Russia, China, or two presidents named Bush. Technically returning to the moon would be easier than in 1969. We know how to do it and, with the Orion and the heavy lift Space Launch System, we are actually building some of the tools with which to do it.
57782069
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MarkWhittington writes:
The results of a NASA funded study suggests that human civilization is going to collapse. The reason is that the “elites” (that is to say the industrialized West) are using too many resources. The study points to previous collapses of civilizations such as Rome and Han Dynasty China as examples of what is in store for us. However the solutions the study offers are draconian and, surprising for something funded by NASA, misses an obvious one that doesn’t involve population control and rationing. That solution is mining off planet resources.
56602449
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MarkWhittington writes:
Now that Robert Park is in the winter of his life and James Van Allen is dead, an unlikely person named Charles Seife, not a scientist but rather a professor of journalism, has taken up the banner of the jihad to destroy NASA's human spaceflight program.
In an article in Slate and a later post on his personal blog, Professor Seife compared the space agency to a Panda, cute but in danger of extinction. The reason, he suggests, NASA's "fixation" on human space flight. Like Van Allen, Park, and a slew of politicians before him, Seife would see NASA's human space flight ended and space exploration solely conducted by robots.
To be sure space probes like Mars Curiosity, Cassini, and the Chinese Chang'e 3 have astonished the world with their scientific discoveries. But those feats do not in any way negate the utility of people as space explorers. Indeed, a 2004 study by the British Royal Astronomical Society concluded that human explorers are crucial for gaining a scientific understanding of the space environment and its phenomenon.
56335253
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MarkWhittington writes:
A series of media reports, including a February 3, 2014 story in the UK Telegraph, suggests that NASA is getting ready to “return to the moon” with a joint probe called RESOLVE it has developed with the Canadian Space Agency. The one problem with that is that an American mission to land on the moon, even a robot, has not received funding. Furthermore NASA lacks a landing vehicle capable of delivering RESOLVE to the lunar surface.
55827931
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MarkWhittington writes:
January, 2014 provides another one of those bitter sweet anniversaries in space history. In this month in 1994, the Clementine probe was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Titan II and was sent to lunar orbit.
Paul Spudis, who was part of the science team of the Clementine mission, has a detailed account here and here. Suffice to say that the mission's origins were unique in the history of space exploration.
By 1994, two space projects with geneses in Republican administrations had become dead or moribund. President George H. W. Bush's Space Exploration Initiative, which would have sent human explorers to the moon and Mars, had never gotten congressional backing and had been unceremoniously cancelled by his successor, President Bill Clinton. The Strategic Defense Initiative, initiated by President Ronald Reagan, had been downgraded thanks to the end of the Cold War and a Democratic administration's disdain for large scale military projects. Yet Clementine represented a strange fusion of the two.
People working on missile defense wanted to test sensors that would eventually detect and track ICBMs. Someone got the bright idea to test those sensors on a celestial body about which much was known already, the moon. Hence was born the mission of Clementine, a military mission that served the desires for space exploration.
55677395
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MarkWhittington writes:
A couple of fairly unlikely developments are pointing to a scenario that could result in an unexpected return to the moon mission involving two unlikely partners if a number of parties are willing to think and work outside the box.
That return to the moon could be a joint Israeli/Saudi Arabian project, fostered by an American commercial company. While there are obvious dangers, especially for the Saudis, the political, diplomatic, and economic advantages of such a joint project, enabled by the Golden Spike Company, would be compelling
55546991
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MarkWhittington writes:
The $17.65 billion appropriations for NASA in the 2014 omnibus spending bill have been generally hailed as a “big win” for the space agency and its high profile programs. There are, however, some dissenting opinions.
Both the heavy lift Space Launch System, NASA's rocket that is designed to send astronauts beyond low Earth orbit, and the commercial crew program, developing government financed, commercially operated spacecraft, seem to have experienced funding shortfalls in the 2014 NASA budget.
