<b>Commercial space takes off</b>

First off, a much belated congratulations to Elon Musk and the folks at SpaceX for last month’s successful test launch of the Falcon 9 vehicle.  The <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NREJEZ5eluk”>video</a> is as spectacular as the story of a company, that for pennies on the dollar, hbas shown a path to reducing launch costs by a whole order of magnitude.  A month on, and SpaceX’s work is <a href=”http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/data_protection/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225700418&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News”>already paying off</a>:

<blockquote>Space Exploration Technologies has signed a $492 million deal to carry Iridium Communications’ mobile telecommunications satellites into space starting in 2015.

Space Exploration, better known as SpaceX, said Wednesday that the deal represents “the largest single commercial launch deal ever signed.” Iridium provides mobile voice and data services around the globe.</blockquote>

This comes right on the heels of SpaceX <a href=”http://www.dailybreeze.com/business/ci_15295526″>scoring a major contract</a> with Taiwan’s civilian space agency.

Not quite sure what to make of Boeing’s <a href=”http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/06/28/boeing-planning-space-shuttle-replacement/”>CST-100</a>, a capsule without a launcher (for the time being) developed with assistance from the same commercial space development program as Falcon 9 and Dragon.  More digging to come.

<b>NASA mission adrift?</b>

Canceling Constellation was a good thing, but not at the cost for the Vision to Explore Space.  The new Administration “strategy,” if you could call it that, accomplishes some good in expanding spending for aeronautics and support for commercial space, but to what end?  The recent brouhaha over Administrator Bolden’s Al-Jazeera interview hardly inspires confidence.

Rand Simberg <a href=”http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-to-nasa-chief-make-muslims-feel-good/”>takes Bolden to task at Pajamas Media</a>, while Paul Mirengoff over at Powerline has this to say:

<blockquote>n the video below, Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the “foremost” task President Obama has given him is “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” Thus, NASA’s primary mission is no longer to enhance American science and engineering or to explore space, but to boost the self-esteem of “predominantly Muslim nations.”

Exploring space didn’t even make the top three things Obama wants Bolden to accomplish. The other two are “re-inspire children to want to get into science and math” and “expand our international relationships,”

This is more evidence, if any were needed, of Obama’s lack of interest in American achievement or, indeed, American greatness. He seems to believe we’ve achieved enough (or perhaps too much) and that the trick now is to make nations that have achieved little for centuries feel like we couldn’t have done it without them (in the video, Bolden goes on to talk about how much NASA owes the Russians and the Japanese).</blockquote>

I draw no general conclusion about Obama’s views on America’s role in the world, but I agree with sentiment that internationalism is infecting American space policy to its detriment.  If you absolutely have to play psychotherapist for a third of the world’s population, use the State Department.  Unfortunately, I fear that the Administration’s disinterest in space–despite the $6 billion in increased funding over the next five years–has left NASA on autopilot, and that we’re on the road to an even more embarrassing clash with reality than Constellation ended up as.

<b>End over end in space</b>

In 2003, the <a href=”http://history.nasa.gov/DPT/DPT.htm”>Decadal Planning Team</a> laid down some major ground work for the long vision of VSE–exploration (and the kernel of settlement) beyond low earth orbit.  One of the architectures they considered for a Mars mission was <a href=”http://astrojava.com/nepag/JSC_NEPAG_NEXT_Briefing.ppt”>AG-NEP (Powerpoint slides)</a>, a vehicle that would tumble end over end to produce artificial gravity as its engines would constantly thrust it towards its destination.  One of the problems, though, was keeping the engines aligned on course.  Well, Kirk Sorenson over at SeleniaBoondocks details a solution drawing an interesting innovation from his work on tethers–<a href=”http://selenianboondocks.com/2010/06/cjoint1/”>the Canfield joint</a>:

<blockquote>He called it a “Trio-Tristar Carpal Wrist Joint.” I thought that sounded like a real mouthful so I just called it “Canfield’s joint” and eventually everyone (except Canfield) began to call it a Canfield joint. It was kind of a crazy looking thing that you couldn’t figure out what to do with it unless you held it in your hands and started playing with it. Unfortunately, in a blog post I can’t reach out of your screen and hand you your own Canfield joint to play with, because if I could you’d figure out in a few seconds what I’m talking about, but the real magic of the Canfield joint is that you can point the joint anywhere in a hemisphere without winding up anything.

The joint has several parts. There’s the “base plate” which stays attached to whatever the joint is mounted to, like your spacecraft, and then there’s the “distal plate”, which points to whatever it is that you want to point at. There are six legs on the joint, in three units. The joint is called a “parallel structure” because there’s more than one load path for the loads to follow, and this is what gives it its potential strength. Where the legs mount to the plates is a simple revolute joint. I didn’t know what that meant so I asked Canfield and he said that it just meant that it was a simple, one-degree-of-freedom (one way to move) joint or hinge. Where the two legs come together you could have a spheric joint (a ball and socket with two degrees-of-freedom) or you could have three revolute joints in series. That’s what we usually do.</blockquote>

This is from the second of a series of three blog posts (<a href=”http://selenianboondocks.com/2010/06/agnep1/”>1</a>, <a href=”http://selenianboondocks.com/2010/06/cjoint1/”>2</a>, <a href=”http://selenianboondocks.com/2010/06/agnep2/”>3</a>), which you should really read in order to fully appreciate an example of the ingenuity engineers bring to tackling problems.  Bottom line, the Canfield joint solves the problem of how to keep engines properly aligned on a tumbling spaceship, and Sorenson has finally produced animations (<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1utgJUvmUA”>1</a>, <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqHigRbS_EA”>2</a>, <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWtzrrmG-gU”>3</a>, and <a href=”http://astrojava.com/nepag/NEPAGVehicle.jnlp”>the grand finale</a>) to visualize how cleverly the solution works.

1800 years ago, the most awesome period in history EVER happened.  At the very least, you could describe it as the inevitable clash between three great men who were bound and determined to etch themselves into the very bone of mankind’s collective memory.  But that would be selling short the hundreds, thousands…no, millions, who lived, lived awesomely, and died in the never ending struggle to bring civilization to us all.

So when you write a diary, post a comment, pull a lever in an election…remember Guan Yu, Zhuge Liang, Shima Yi, Sun Quan, Zhang Fei, and Lu Bu when you do.

Not convinced our space policy is in the shitter? The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee met yesterday to reveal its penultimate ignorance and lack of ambition in what had to have been two-thirds self-laudatory fluff followed by the most ignorant kabuki dance between Congresscritter and Executive branch flunky you could imagine.

What’s really disturbing is that we’re so damned caught up on the LEO component. In fact, the sharpest criticism I’ve heard from the Augustinophiles pertains to Ares I/Orion. Ares V and Moonshoot II simply drop off the radar–the principal objective of Constellation–doesn’t even get on the radar in these overheated debates. For all the bitching about Ares I’s costs, FY2011 doesn’t do a damn thing new in terms of commercial private spaceflight. Falcon 9 was already on track in all phases of the COTS program; in fact, we’ve been playing games with the SpaceX’s funding for a year now. FY2011 finally commits $369 million towards bringing COTS and CRS towards initial delivery, but don’t be fooled–we would’ve gotten there whether or not the Administration decided to axe the only decent reason for us to be in space in the first place.

Augustinophiles over at NASA Watch are still pissed at Mike Griffin:

According eye witnesses, Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan showed up a little early today before their hearing on Capitol Hill. They arrived at the special ante room (waiting room) mentioned by Sen. Rockefeller at one point in the hearings. According to these eye witnesses, Armstrong and Cernan were accompanied by Mike Griffin. This synchs with the widely-held suspicon that not only did Griffin help write Neil Armstrong’s prepared comments, but also that Griffin has been spearheading much of the behind the scenes lobbying against the Obama Space policy on Capitol Hill. Gee, I hope he is registered … Stay tuned.

Mike Griffin has more vision in his thumbnail than all of the guys at NASA Watch combined. As much as I wish we wouldn’t spend $20 billion a year to look down on Earth on the specious theory that children are inspired by looking at hurricane tracks and images of oil spills, that’s about all that’s allowed by the imaginations of today’s space “advocates.”

Clark Lindsey dismisses astronaut testimony as a stunt:

Arguments from authority are among the weakest of all arguments. Being chosen as the first and last visitors to the Moon did not include authorization as life long final arbiters of space policy. As the Washington Post article points out, there are a number of astronauts who disagree with them. If, for example, Buzz Aldrin and Sally Ride had been there instead, not only would they have argued from authority but from the knowledge gained by long involvement in the issues and the tough budget choices that must made.

Which is exactly why Ride and Aldrin were on the Augustine team. You’ll find an astronaut to support any of the countless constituencies NASA has, even more so once you move past the Apollo generation. Unfortunately, it seems that the dream of actually conquering space was lost amongst our later generations of spacefarers–who seem to fall into Aldrin’s camp of restricting space access to a select club of would be superstars. Ultimately, you’ll end up with an astronaut of Charles Bolden’s character–a man whose vision is limited to his own 9-5 ambitions.

I don’t disagree with Lindsey on any particular point, or Rand Simberg for that matter. I also don’t necessarily buy Captain Cernan’s argument that Newspace will cost three times its advertising price or Charles Bolden’s reported concerns that commercial space will face some cost exploding obstacles in the years to come. What I do object to is the notion that a ten-year expenditure estimated over a wide variation of $1 to $1 billion is a gospel solid constraint mandated by the dead hand of some vague budget reality, or that we need to give up the Moon–our only hope for settling space–in order to keep a lethargic satellite launch industry alive. I also don’t buy the argument that commercial services to the Space Station will magically birth private manned spaceflight in the same environment. You don’t have to be an astronaut, rocket scientist, engineer, or even an economist to know that there’s nothing in LEO.

Anyways, Flex Path diary rant–check. Moving on.

ISS resupply for $200 million a month, anyone?:

The second of ESA’s ATV automated cargo craft has been cleared for shipping to the launch site in Kourou. Its launch on an Ariane 5 to the International Space Station is scheduled for late this year.

ATV-2, named after German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, has undergone extensive system testing at EADS Astrium’s site in Bremen, Germany, over the last few months and has now been given the go-ahead for shipping.

It will be dispatched to Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana in several sections, accompanied by 59 containers with test equipment. In Kourou, it will be assembled and extensively tested before being loaded with cargo and fuelled. The launch is now planned for the end of 2010.

“After an internal review of ATV Johannes Kepler, we have given Astrium ‘consent-to-ship’, which is an important milestone,” says Simonetta Di Pippo, ESA Director for Human Spaceflight.

“This demonstrates the ability of European industry under the lead of Astrium to provide the requested status of the vehicle on time and with the requested quality.”

“When the US Space Shuttle retires, ATV will be the largest vehicle supplying the ISS. Considering its technological challenges, like automatic rendezvous & docking, ATV is the most sophisticated space vehicle ever built in Europe.”

I’d love if Newspace beat out the Europeans in cost, but I’m not so sure they’ll do it in time. SpaceX makes a lot of noise about delivery by 2012, but until I see the Falcon 9 with a Dragon payload launch and rendezvous with ISS, I’m not holding my breath.

Shyeah, right

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea claimed Wednesday that its scientists succeeded in creating a nuclear fusion reaction, but experts doubted the isolated communist country actually had made the breakthrough in the elusive clean-energy technology.

Nuclear fusion stories generally piss me off. They usually fall into two categories. Endless boring budgetary news about constructing the next biggest tokamak, or unvetted press releases from individuals, companies and societies of dubious authority.

Heavy-lift, alive but knee-capped.

In his April 15 speech at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla., U.S. President Barack Obama said the space agency would spend the next five years studying new technologies and materials before settling on a heavy-lift rocket design. But NASA documents and comments from agency officials suggest the White House already has a design firmly in mind.

The document was revised between May 3 and 5 to eliminate a particularly foolish fuel constraint. Spaceref has the modified request.

Summary: We’re going to take five years to reinvent Ares V, and God knows how long to actually build, test and the fly the damned thing…if at all.

Nothing of interest from the ISS.

Summary. People woke up, ate breakfast, popped pills, vlogged, and tightened bolts.

Ice and chemicals on 24 Themis:

Scientists using a NASA funded telescope have detected water-ice and carbon-based organic compounds on the surface of an asteroid. The cold hard facts of the discovery of the frosty mixture on one of the asteroid belt’s largest occupants, suggests that some asteroids, along with their celestial brethren, comets, were the water carriers for a primordial Earth. The research is published in today’s issue of the journal Nature.

“For a long time the thinking was that you couldn’t find a cup’s worth of water in the entire asteroid belt,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Today we know you not only could quench your thirst, but you just might be able to fill up every pool on Earth – and then some.”

Outstanding. Now how about finding a similar near Earth asteroid that we can actually use?

Another conservative drinks the Flexible Path kool-aid:

We free-marketers know that the free market can make improvements, cut costs, and make innovations based on the actions of the competitive marketplace. Manned space flight as conducted by NASA over the last fifty years had none of this. As a result, we have a 35-year-old design (shuttle) that flies very little and is increasingly accident-prone. In the 35 years from the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903 to 1938, we went from the Wright Flier to the B-17. Why hasn’t there been similar progress in manned space flight? The answer is that it has been a government monopoly for fifty years.

We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of the Commercial Space Launch Act, we’ve grown a quarter trillion dollar industry that has all but run out of excuses to launch satellites, and we were moving towards commericial transport to the ISS five years ago. The problem isn’t government sponsored manned space flight–which is the only reason anyone’s up there in the first place. It’s that government manned spaceflight has no direction whatsoever. Flexible Path is just the first time a White House has had the balls to come out and say it.

Colin Doughan has a blog, interviews Alan Wasser on property rights in space:

Sending astronauts to the Space Station will be the first revenue stream for private space development. The second revenue stream will be space tourists, starting with the very rich, of course, but expanding as soon as possible to an ever widening segment of the public.

Unfortunately, however, those and all other currently identified revenue streams added together aren’t enough to attract real venture capitalists, only enough to attract rich philanthropists.

Interesting. So, how do you get to your new lunar homestead?

Paul Spudis on lunar water:

A significant amount of water at the poles of the Moon is present, with many billions of metric tonnes at each pole (detailed estimates of the water reserves are in progress). Such an amount is more than enough to support both permanent, sustainable human presence on the Moon and for export to cislunar space.

We know we can live on the moon. We’ve got good reason to believe we can industrialize the Moon. So why do we have a space policy that isn’t focused on getting us back there as soon as practically possible?

Revealing insight into NASA’s continuing lack of seriousness where it concerns commercial:

Case in point: Falcon 9 is ready to go. All that is preventing a launch is final approval of its flight termination system — an explosives-and-communication system that lets safety officials blow up a rocket in flight if it’s off course or somehow a threat to people or property below.

Falcon 9 has a flight termination system. But current rules require tracking the origin of every piece and part in the system, forcing SpaceX to use older components and a limited supplier base. The company would rather use modern, off-the-shelf components, that could be obtained from a broader range of suppliers — likely at a substantial cost savings. It’ll work out, but it’s taking extra time and money.

It’s bad enough we’re going to pretend that a commercial purchasing with one customer is something new and substantially any different from the contracting that drives NASA’s entire goddamned history. But can we at least get the Marshall folks out of SpaceX’s hair?