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http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1360/1

Ferret ELINT operations in Iran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Dark_Gene#Project_Ibex

That was very catastrophic. This is what it looked like, so no, I don't think they got it back. The one they're putting on display is "probably" a model that was never supposed to fly in the first place, just a test article.

heh.

I think you mean interstellar, not extragalactic.

Certainly, thanks for that. :)

it is doubtful that it would be sensible to spend a similar sum on a follow-up.

Did you know Explorer 1 was 12 minutes late? The twelve-minute hiatus of Explorer 1. I just found this response to that article, which concludes that something is indeed amiss...

Reading this article just confirmed my opinion that NASA is hiding something here. I don't think Hoagland knows what it is, but he is certainly correct that something is rotten. If the official story were true, then we would not have to see articles like this by Harris fifty years later, fudging equations and spinning furiously to create cover.
- http://milesmathis.com/pi4.html

'American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we

- aha, keep dreaming.

The US bond crisis is coming, followed immediately by the currency crisis. I bet there will be more pressing needs, like more weapons to start resource wars against multiple countries much before the US will once again be able to go far into space in its new ships, never mind having humans on board there....

While you may well be correct, remember that the percentage of the GDP that the US expends for space exploration is pretty much a rounding error. We can afford it.

FTA:

"If properly described, these images are not low-cost competitors to NASA spacecraft (as some media reports try to claim) but instead appetizers for the “real thing”: actual flights into space, suborbitally or orbitally"

Can you call yourself a scientist if you believe that you must follow certain traditions in order for your space flight to be successful?

example: the 2007 national budget was about $2.784 trillion. At $16.143 billion, spending on NASA accounts for 0.58% of this.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/898/1

And we all know that NASA has suffered budget cuts since '07, so yeah, less than a half a percent of the budget goes to them.

Key point : Pollution affects Humans too. If you are interested in there being human beings around in the future you need to either, A) Get us off planet to other colonies or B) preserve the "colony" we have. There may be some other creature that evolves with our capacity for abstraction and application of abstraction (i.e. engineering) on Earth. However if you believe that intelligence like ours is rare in the Universe and also believe it is worthwhile, then we need to handle Earth a little better or start funding Nasa with our cigarette and booze money. Budget Comparison to Consumer Expenditures and SpaceReview.

It's unusual to hear someone praising ITAR. ITAR is the reason that non-US organisations generally don't use US launchers for their payloads -- they can't work closely with the launch provider, particularly with respect to the sort of detailed technical information that's often very important in ensuring payload-launcher compatibility. People I've spoken to in the space industry while at conferences in the US frequently bemoan the fact that ITAR heavily restricts their hiring practices, meaning that they often miss out on being able to employ top people. ITAR is what's holding the US space programme back.

Completely agreed. It's particularly silly when one notes that the US would have almost certainly lost the 1960s space race if it weren't for Von Braun and his team of rocket engineers from Germay, and the Canadian and British engineers from Avro.

It also makes it considerably more difficult when a launch provider like SpaceX wants to sell launch services, which is a large part of why Russian and European launch providers are currently creaming US launch providers on the international market. For example, the following difficulty occurred when SpaceX's Falcon 1 was launching a Malaysian satellite:

http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=13078

Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocket's upper stage and the payload adapter.

"The easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but that's not allowed," Musk says.

No, they don't.

Speed of an aircraft carrier is classified. Operational depth of submarines are classified. Crush depth of submarines are classified. Speed of the F-22 is classified. Range, speed and max depth of torpedos is classified. What the X-37 is doing up in space, classified.

The US intelligence satellite constellation, all classified.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/health/01iht-01patc.11576407.html
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1

The space program is funded. The reason for the gap isn't a lack of funding, its a matter of extremely poor management.

Not true. Both the NRC report

The report urged Congress and the White House to seriously examine the mismatch between the tasks assigned to NASA and the resources that the agency has been provided to accomplish them.

and the Augustine report:

"...Augustine acknowledged that they had not found any mismanagement nor any insurmountable technical obstacles to the completion of the current program."

contradict your statement. NASA has been perennially underfunded.

You mean like the New Horizons probe currently heading towards Pluto? It's a bit more expensive ($650 million for the lifetime of the program) than your goal. But that not too surprising. In a Space Review article from 2004, it discusses costing $5 million launch costs just to put a small payload in Earth orbit. Since we're talking about escaping Earth orbit, it's going to take a larger (and more expensive) launch vehicle. Ariane 5 launches are up around $100 million, while shuttle launches average out to $450.

Loserboy nerd, that'a very notorious and long-ago debunked urban legend. You don't use pencils in freefall because the graphite rod can fragment and you don't want graphite fragments floating about and end up in your lungs and eyes or in the electrical equipment. Read the story on http://www.thespacereview.com/article/613/1 while I beat you up and shit on your face.

I am not disagreeing that information about space or life in other places would be interesting. These days I tend to think that bacteria came from outside the solar system myself, given how hardy bacteria is, and how statistically it would just be more likely it came from elsewhere with one small Earth and one big universe. I'm disagreeing with how compelling that would be as a call to action in current US society. As in, "Oh, gee, cute seamonsters on Europa. Now, what kind of cosmetics should we be producing to make the most money?"
http://www.skininc.com/treatments/cosmetics/16814576.html
"Global color cosmetics sales reached $36.8 billion in 2007, ..."

It has been said more people have walked on the Moon than have been to the bottom of the "deep ocean floor".
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_part_of_the_ocean_has_been_least_explored

We even have AI about to emerge seriously in twenty years or so (let alone new human/machine hybrids). Big yawn by most people.
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

Frankly, the world would probably be a better place if we took all that money that goes into a search for life in space and put it towards helping understand and preserve life around Earth. One example of where the money would be better spent:
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine."

A few hundred billion spent on sustainable and resilient infrastructure done in a free and open source way, would let us bootstrap our civilization to the stars. In that sense, all the money spend on big science of other sorts has just kept us from creating space habitats. Related, on my own (self-funded) efforts to that end:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563102&cid=31279590

Basically, the scientists at NASA have politically triumphed over the engineers. So, NASA does amazing scientific experiments with, for the most part, 1960s technology, with lots of money for science but comparatively little for innovation (and of course, the Shuttle has eaten up most of NASA's budget in general, anyway, so the engineers and scientists were just fighting over scraps left over). And beyond that, there are records showing how NASA has from the start been primarily funded for military goals (to demonstrate intimidating technical leadership):
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK+Library+and+Museum/News+and+Press/JFK+Library+Releases+White+House+Tape+on+Space+Race.htm
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/735/1
"We know that such recordings can shed substantial light on Kennedy's thinking on space because of another tape that was released five years ago and gained a surprising amount of media attention in the sleepy month of August 2001. That recording, number 60 in the Kennedy Library, concerned a November 1962 meeting between Kennedy, Webb, and several other top White House and NASA officials to discuss the NASA budget. During that meeting, Kennedy made the comment that "I'm not that interested in space..." explaining that he supported the lunar program because it was a race against the Soviets: "the Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that's why we're doing it," Kennedy explained."

O

NASA's budget is less than 0.5% of the federal budget, so arguing cost cutting is a red herring. Entitlement spending expansion without end as the baby boomers retire is the real structural deficit that needs to be addressed. Here is a slightly dated article that explains this a little better. And, as I understand it, they are actually expanding funding for NASA, just taking the plans for an american moon mission off the table, and redirecting that to R&D.

Mules also happen to have their own logistics costs, are slower, less capable, and can not reach all the same terrains this robot can.

Yes yes, we've all heard the joke, The Soviets used a pencil, NASA spent millions on inventing the space pen. (More of a myth actually, see: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/613/1)

Here you go: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1100/1

Why does NASA have to campaign for greater safety standards? Why can't they implement them without the "politicians" approval?

Because unfortunately, it's quite likely that the main reason this is being done is to shut out competitors in private spaceflight. It goes something like this:

* Although the Astronaut Corps is full of brave and intelligent individuals, the fact of the matter is that they have a huge revolving door with ATK, an aerospace/defense contractor which specializes in solid motors. Astronauts know it's quite likely that they'll become an executive at ATK after their astronaut gig is up, and quite a few gigs will be up once the Space Shuttle is retired.

* ATK is a major contractor on the Ares I rocket, which has claims of being 100x-1000x safer than the alternatives, due to the fact that it uses a single large ATK solid motor as its first stage. Of course, quite a few aerospace engineers believe that these claims are total bullshit, and it's quite possible that despite NASA and ATK's publicized calculations, in practice the Ares I will actually be more dangerous than the alternatives (EELVs, DIRECT, SpaceX, etc.). There's a number of potential problems with the Ares I which aren't accounted for in the calculations: thrust oscillation, solid propellant debris clouds, the added difficulty of escaping from a solid rocket, the fact that safety systems have had to be cut out due to mass constraints, etc. Also, the sort of accident factors which go into the Ares I's supposed super-safe accident probability calculations actually only account for an absurdly small percentage of launch accidents in practice.

* Recently the fate of the Ares I has become uncertain, as people are questioning if its wise for NASA to spend $35 billion of its limited funding to develop a new medium-lift rocket which won't be ready until 2017-2019, when plenty of other medium-lift rockets already exist and could become equipped for manned launch for prices ranging from a few hundred million to $3 billion.

* It remains to be seen what'll happen at the hearing, but my guess is that a number of those testifying from NASA will claim that Ares I will be dramatically safer than commercial alternatives, and therefore Ares should continue getting funding instead of looking at alternatives. They'll probably cite the bullshit safety figures again to try to bolster their case. I believe there's one person testifying who's a proponent of commercial spaceflight, and I suspect he'll be beaten down by Congress.

* It's looking like Rep. Jim Oberstar might be heading the hearing. Back in 2004 Oberstar tried (in the interest of safety, of course) to kill off commercial suborbital spaceflight companies like Virgin Galactic by having them regulated at the same sort of levels that mature commercial airlines are regulated.

What protectionism is in place? The only thing that we have is that any space tech can not be shared with China.

ITAR restrictions (where pretty much anything, however mundane, related to satellites is classified as a munition) are actually rather more problematic than you describe for space industry, although there fortunately seems to be some progress on that:

http://thespacereview.com/article/1503/1

A decade-long concern for the US space industry has been export control regulations. Since satellites and related components were put under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), space businesses, including manufacturers or commercial satellites and their subsystems, have raised the alarm that the stricter ITAR rules were hurting their ability to sell to customers outside the US, even to close allies. Companies, industry organizations, and their supporters have sought for much of this time to at least partially roll back those changes to enhance their competitiveness.

While the drumbeat for reform isn't necessarily as loud as it was a few years ago, thanks in part to procedural changes that have reduced the backlog of, and waiting time for, export license applications, there is now real evidence of progress towards the reforms the industry has sought. A section of HR 2410, a State Department authorization bill that the House approved in June, deals with export control and includes a number of key reforms that the industry has been seeking.

"It accomplishes many, if not almost all, of the things that people in the export control reform movement have been dreaming of for quite a while," said Mike Gold, director of the Washington office of Bigelow Aerospace and a leading advocate for export control reform, during a presentation at the COMSTAC meeting last week.

One key component is what Gold called a "review and revision" of the US Munitions List (USML), the compilation of components that are subject to ITAR. The bill would require a review of at least 20 percent of the USML every year for five years to determine if items should be removed from the list. After the five-year period the review would start over to allow updates based on advances in technology.

Another aspect of the bill would give the President the ability to remove satellites and related components from the USML, although it would still not allow the export of such items to China. The bill language would also require the public release of what are known as commodity jurisdiction determinations, when the State Department evaluates whether a specific technology belongs on the USML or not.

The good news for export control reform advocates is that the bill has passed the House. The bad news, as Gold explained, is that the Senate has taken no action on the bill yet, and there's no indication when--or even if--they will take up the legislation before the end of the next year. "To be honest, we haven't even heard any good rumors as to if this is something that rises to the level of priority" that the Senate will take action on, Gold said.

Key to the future of the bill is Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "If Senator Kerry chooses to prioritize export control reform, it most likely will get done," Gold said.

Gold also noted there is a review of export control policy going on within the new administration, although that may be of limited effectiveness for the space industry since the inclusion of satellites and related components on the USML was done in legislation and therefore must be undone that way. However, he said that the actual law does provide some "wiggle room" for the administration to change how it implements that law, if it so chooses. "If there isn't a legislative fix, there is still the possibility--certainly not a strong possibility, but the potential anyway--of the executive branch doing something helpful

NASA is a very small portion of the budget. According to this link, americans 19 times the money on fast food in 1997 then the gov't spent on NASA that same year. Link

As of 2007 Nasa was .58% (that is .0058) of the US budget. Link 2

Some items to note:

• The rocket [nationalgeographic.com] was the tallest [space.com] (and possibly most expensive, at $450 million) suborbital rocket ever assembled, consisting of a solid rocket motor from the Space Shuttle and an Atlas V avionics system, with a non-functional upper stage put on top.
• The Ares I-X has roughly the same shape (but different internal components) compared to NASA's planned medium-lift Ares I, which is scheduled to be completed after 2017 with an estimated cost of $1-$2 billion per launch. A lot of people have been calling this a flight test of the Ares I, but considering how drastically different the Ares I would be in flight, it's really quite a stretch, and it also unfortunately doesn't address any of the biggest potential problems with the Ares I (5-segment booster vibration properties, launch abort survivability, etc.). If anything, it's more similar to a full-size wind tunnel test.
• Even though the fate of the Ares I itself (and the overall future direction [thespacereview.com] of NASA spaceflight) is uncertain, the >700 sensors on the Ares I-X should provide data useful for validating computer models [spaceflightnow.com] used by NASA."
• For all its faults, it's still worth noting that this is somewhat of an accomplishment for NASA, as its the first new launch vehicle design they've attempted to launch in 30 years, after a long string of failed designs (X-30, X-33, X-34, National Launch System, Space Launch Initiative, Orbital Space Plane). Actually, now that I think about it, the DC-X [wikipedia.org] successfully launched, although I suppose that was constructed by McDonnell Douglas for the DOD before it was transferred to (and canceled by) NASA. Of course, one could still ask why NASA is trying to internally design a new vehicle when the private sector has a much better track record over the past 30 years of bringing new launch vehicle designs into service, but I imagine it's still been a learning experience for NASA. Hopefully they'll learn the right lessons from it, whatever those are.

(I largely copied this from a comment I made yesterday, but it still seems pertinent)

Some items to note:

• The rocket is the tallest (and possibly most expensive, at $450 million) suborbital rocket ever assembled, consisting of a solid rocket motor from the Space Shuttle and an Atlas V avionics system, with a non-functional upper stage put on top.
• The Ares I-X has roughly the same shape (but different internal components) compared to NASA's planned medium-lift Ares I, which is scheduled to be completed after 2017 with an estimated cost of $1-$2 billion per launch. A lot of people have been calling this a flight test of the Ares I, but considering how drastically different the Ares I would be in flight, it's really quite a stretch. If anything, it's more similar to a full-size wind tunnel test.
• Even though the fate of the Ares I itself (and the overall future direction of NASA spaceflight) is uncertain, the >700 sensors on the Ares I-X should provide data useful for validating computer models used by NASA."
• For all its faults, it's still worth noting that this is somewhat of an accomplishment for NASA, as its the first new launch vehicle design they've attempted to launch in 30 years, after a long string of failed designs (X-30, X-33, X-34, National Launch System, Space Launch Initiative, Orbital Space Plane). Actually, now that I think about it, the DC-X successfully launched, although I suppose that was constructed by McDonnell Douglas for the DOD before it was transferred to (and canceled by) NASA. Of course, one could still ask why NASA is trying to internally design a new vehicle when the private sector has a much better track record over the past 30 years of bringing new launch vehicle designs into service, but I imagine it's still been a learning experience for NASA. Hopefully they'll learn the right lessons from it, whatever those are.

So presumably you're not interested in space.. Jeff Foust goes to just about every space conference there is and reports via twitter on what he sees there. You'll find stuff there that a wider audience might not appreciate. As I can't go to these conferences myself, it's invaluable, I don't have to wait for the winds to decide that something Jeff sees is worthy of turning into one of his fantastic articles.

Of course, this is just one way people use twitter.. call them the "stuff I thought was interesting" posters.. kinda like reddit or digg, but the opt-in nature makes the feeds more intimate. There are indeed people on twitter who go on about everything that happens in their day, or mix up their personal stuff, that I don't care about, with their professional stuff, which I dont - or visa-versa. Mostly I just unfollow such people.. occasionally I've managed to convince them that they shouldn't "cross the streams". http://twitter.com/focusfusion for example started out tweeting about her difficulties getting a driver's license and other personally crap.. she eventually got the message that we follow her to hear about the project she's reporting on, and she can go make a separate personal feed for the rest.

There's value in there, it just takes some experimentation to fine tune who you follow to get the kind of feed you want. twitter is basically the RSS revolution that never happened, rebranded.

Without the usage of something other than chemical rockets, there will be no meaningful human space flight.

What do you mean by "meaningful space flight"? There's still quite a lot of room for cost-efficiency with chemical rockets -- Elon Musk of SpaceX figures there's at least room for an order of magnitude of a price drop. IMHO, NASA should focus on getting the prices of chemical rockets to drop with things with things like commercial space transport procurement, while using the money it saves to resume its efforts into developing new space technologies. Unfortunately, when the Ares I going overbudget, instead of canceling the Ares I they just canceled almost all of their (already sparse) technology development efforts.

Ok, not to be whiny, but I didn't like this particular summary, as it mentions the panel's conclusion that NASA's current path is unworkable, but doesn't make any mention of the alternative paths forwarded presented by the Committee (and discussed in the article). Here's an alternative summary, with some links to the actual report summary (which I suspect none of the commenters so far have actually read):

A summary of the Augustine Committee's upcoming report on the future of US spaceflight has been submitted to the White House and NASA, and made available to the public. The committee's analysis found that NASA's current plans for a human lunar return by 2020 are unworkable, with NASA's status quo not likely to place them on the moon 'until well into the 2030s, if ever'. Raising NASA's budget by $3B/year opens two primary options: 'Moon First' with a lunar return and possible base-building starting in the mid-2020s, or 'Flexible Path,' which would initially focus on building an in-space architecture for supporting progressive exploration, starting with Lagrange points and Near-Earth Objects (asteroids and comets) in the early 2020s, and exploring the moons of Mars or Earth in the mid-2020s. Options for a heavy-lift launcher were also outlined: NASA's current plans for an Ares V, a less costly 'directly Shuttle-derived' vehicle, or the least costly (but politically most difficult) 'new way of doing business' of purchasing launches on an upgraded EELV. Other key findings are that the ISS should be extended to 2020, that developing in-space refueling would benefit all of NASA's options, that NASA should make use of commercial crew transportation, that NASA should revive its space technology development program (which had largely stagnated in past decades), and that while Mars should be the ultimate destination for human exploration, it is not the best first destination. The White House and NASA will review the report and announce NASA's forward path in early October.

I don't know anything about the internal NASA management bureaucracy, but I do know about bureaucracy in business and government agencies. It is by no means guaranteed that Mr. Cook is responsible for the failures of the projects that he managed. He might well be, but it certainly does not automatically follow. Bureaucracies excel at separating authority from responsibility (in fact, it can be argued that this is a core purpose of a bureaucracy, although personally I would disagree with that goal). Mr. Cook might well have known, for example, how to salvage on or more of those projects. Many of the failures to complete R&D on next-generation launch technologies were due to the budget over-run problems of the Space Shuttle program, which left the other programs continually starved for and competing for limited funding pools which were stretched too thin. NASA didn't have the budget flexibility to sustain an R&D program like X-33 through to completion.

The relatively well documented failure of the X-33 VentureStar project, for example, is known to be in part due to a project requirement (a cryogenic carbon fiber composite H2 tank) that the Lockheed Martin engineers identified as a risk (due to immature materials technology). Yes, it was NASA who insisted on taking the risk without proper scheduling and funding for risk reduction, and that is a failure of project management.

However, the internal NASA politics that led to this may be pretty complicated, and I haven't seen any discussion of that. Mr. Cook might well have fought on behalf of the engineers, but lost. It's also possible to look at the X-33 program and decide that it was on the verge of success. The project was under-funded, but the problems appeared to be reasonably clear engineering and materials science problems, which also appeared to have pretty clear solutions paths available (for a fee). The ramp for the aerospike engine was too heavy, and the carbon fiber tank technology was immature. Both of those are materials technology problems where the solutions could be had. In fact, it appears that the tank problem was solvable with current tech (aluminum-lithium alloy, like the modern version of the Space Shuttle external tank) and improved carbon fiber technology, which was apparently demonstrated after the cancellation of the X-33 program. The aerospike ramp weight also could be solved. Meanwhile, the heat shield technology developed was apparently impressive, and the aerospike engine work was also viewed in retrospect as pretty successful.

Another thing I've observed is that government agencies, at least under the Bush administration, were literally obsessed with talking about "lessons learned" from failed projects. Unfortunately, they tended to learn the wrong lessons, often because the real lessons were not politically or organizationally acceptable. Here's an article on the X-33 as an example: Lesson in Failed X-33 Bid, New Engine Promising. The real lessons: doing something useful (reducing the cost of payload to LEO) is hard work, the X-33 was close to achieving the difficult objectives the project was assigned, and yes, it would have been well worth an extra $1 Billion to complete the project and demonstrate the suite of useful technologies developed. Instead, NASA senior management internalized a false "lesson" because they don't need to admit management failure when they simply throw up their hands and blame the concept of a reusable LEO launcher.

"Why send people?" is modded "Troll"? A bit offtopic maybe, but not "Troll". This is the question we must be able to answer if we are to have a successful manned space program, Constellation, DIRECT, COTS, or otherwise.

In the Apollo era, manned space flight provided another means to fund weapons development. The launch vehicles of the early space program, including the Saturn family, are variations of ballistic missiles or started development as heavy launch vehicles for DoD payloads. We are no longer in the same kind of arms race, and finding money to fund civil aerospace ventures is not as easy as military ones.

Many have tried to explain "why" manned space flight in general, let alone the moon and Mars (recently here and here). It is not an easy question to answer. Arguments to the contrary range from "robots are cheaper" to "we should stop spending money on space altogether and address the large number of problems we have here on Earth".

There are those that will say we should do it simply because it is there to explore. That it is human nature. Because it is the unknown, the "final frontier", if you will. A romantic notion (and one that is more than enough to convince some of us), but in the end, this is a political question. We must justify spending tax dollars on manned space flight. What's in it for the taxpayers? While some like to point to technologies that have been spun off of NASA's work over the years, it's not easy to say that the tax-paying public will get X, Y, and Z from future investments.

The true answer here is one that few, if any, politician would ever use even if they knew it was the answer. Why send people? So that we can to guarantee our survival as a species. Humanity has spread beyond the cradle of its birth for many reasons. Initially the exodus was to find more room and resources to support our growing species. Later it was from reasons ranging from natural disasters to religious disputes to dreams of fortune in other lands. If our entire species lived at the foot of a volcano, the volcano could wipe us all out. Our species has spread such that it cannot be wiped out by most natural (or even man-made) disasters. It is only recently that we have started thinking at a scale larger than our local area on this planet. There is plenty of evidence of mass extinctions throughout the Earth's history. Whether by internal (global climate change) or external (comet/asteroid) forces, we are essentially planted at the base of a cosmic volcano. It is time to move beyond the fertile cradle of humanity's birth to ensure its long-term survival. In the past it took picking up and moving to a new field or forest or across a desert or an ocean. These took a variety of effort and planning, but none compare to the journey ahead of us. Our vision as a species, recognizing our strengths and weaknesses and the environment that surrounds us, must guide these decisions for the future. We have taken the first steps to develop habitats for humans to live and work and experiment and learn outside of Earth's atmosphere. We now must take the next steps to develop habitats and technologies that allow us to survive in even harsher environments...those on other planetary bodies. The moon is the closest, and perhaps one of the harshest, places for us to start to take these steps. Without this step, we cannot make the more important steps of leaving our orbit for others around the sun, and someday to other solar systems. We will most definitely not see the results in our lifetimes, but we need to be at a place where our short individual lives don't dictate every decision we make as a species.

Most people alive today can name Armstrong and Aldrin (and some even Collins...though sadly not enough). How many know the names of Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt? Or can name the most recent shuttle o

Glad you asked.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1369/1

"As the report says "The ADF's primary operational environment is a vast area. We need to have comprehensive situational awareness and an ability to operate within this environment with decisive military effect, if required." This means that Australia must have a fairly comprehensive set of space-based assets, not just communications and imaging satellites but eventually, at a minimum, GPS augmentation and electronic intelligence gathering spacecraft."

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/330/1

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/347/1

As for Colin Pillinger, note that the (initially secret) ESA report on the Beagle failure put much of the blame on project management failings and he's not been put in charge of any large project since.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/330/1

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/347/1

As for Colin Pillinger, note that the (initially secret) ESA report on the Beagle failure put much of the blame on project management failings and he's not been put in charge of any large project since.

Of course it's possible to accelerate payloads gradually, using a launch ring.

Another cool idea: airship to orbit. More. Still more.

In any case, we need something beyond standard chemical rockets to get cheap access to orbit.

The website says the top of the BFTS ("Big Falcon Test Stand") is 235 feet high. ... Also, while I love the company, I woudl say that they did just buy the site, including the test stand from another company that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head.

The test stand originally belonged to Beal Aerospace a private spaceflight startup which went defunct back in the dot-com days.

One thing that's pretty cool is that SpaceX is also developing a rocket (the "BFR") that will be too big for the BFTS. Also, I think one can assume from the names that Elon Musk is probably a Doom fan.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/497/1

The development of Merlin 2 begs the question: what is SpaceX planning that requires such a powerful engine? In past talks Musk has hinted at the development of something called the "BFR" (where B stands for "big" and R for "rocket"), a heavy-lift vehicle far larger than the Falcon family of vehicles. At SpaceVision2005 Musk disclosed that the BFR, in its current iteration, would use "multiple" Merlin 2 engines. The BFR would be able to place 100 tons in low Earth orbit, putting it in competition with NASA's planned shuttle-derived heavy-lift launcher. The BFR is so big, Musk said, that it's too large for the BFTS at their Texas test site: even if they beefed up the stand, he said, the overpressure from the engine tests would break windows in a nearby town. Musk said they would have to test the vehicle either at the launch site or, perhaps, at NASAâ(TM)s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

... and then, if you scroll down a little in the referenced article, this line is interesting: "Mexico seems to be the hotspot for illegal exports of firearms, including assault weapons and rifles, as well as large quantities of ammunition, the DOJ stated." So, apparently bullets are part of this "illegal export of [US] technology"

The Space Review has an article on the motives of entrepreneurs:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1216/1

The author, Bob Clarebrough, suggests that the "economic rational" motives proclaimed by Adam Smith are really only surface effects of the greater motivation: passion and vision.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1188/1

Time is short. Senior NASA management is committed to beginning the destruction of the tooling used to construct the Space Shuttle's External Tank as early as next month. This destruction is completely unnecessary to support the current Ares 1 production plan because the floor space NASA plans to use is not occupied by the External Tank tooling. The only apparent objective of beginning the destruction of this $12-billion national asset next month, used by both the Space Shuttle and Jupiter Launch System, is to maliciously eliminate any competition to the current plan. In an attempt to put a halt to this unnecessary destruction of government property, the Senate version of 2009 NASA authorization bill sought to make this imminent action of the NASA administrator explicitly illegal. Specifically, the Senate provision directed the NASA administrator "to terminate or suspend any activity of the Agency that, if continued, would preclude the continued safe and effective flight of the Space Shuttle Orbiter after fiscal year 2010." Unfortunately, this provision, that cost us nothing to include yet wisely keeps our options open, was removed from the Senate-House conference bill just before the summer recess.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1

It was posted in this story further down, so here it is redundantly.

Plus, they have to be lofted in public view and there is an entire art to determining their missions based on their project patches:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1

Who do you think bullt Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo? Not NASA.

NASA had much of the design work done in house though, right? Not really.

Get rid of NASA, and who 'runs' the ongoing space programs? Duh. I say keep NASA, for all its failings. The choice is NASA or just contractors.

No choice.

Oberg had an earlier analysis (March 2008) on the same topic in The Space Review that covers many of the same points with a little more detail than this article.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1073/1

The new VX-200 (VASIMR Experimental, 200 kW) lab prototype we are working on has the capability of applying 200 kW of total RF power. ~30 kW to the first stage (Helicon plasma source), and ~ 170 kW to the second stage (Ion Cyclotron Heating, ICH, stage). The VX-200 will also have superconducting magnets (to be delivered in several weeks). The peak magnetic field inside the VX-200 will be on the order of two tesla, similar to the field strength in a strong MRI machine. At our old lab in NASA-JSC, we actually had a pacemaker safety line that limited people from getting too close to the intense magnetic field. Please see http://www.adastrarocket.com/vx200.html for a few more details.

The VASIMR engine that will be placed on the International Space Station (ISS) will likely be the VF-200 (VASIMR Flight, 200 kW). However, the flight version will actually have two 100 kW plasma cores. The two cores will have antiparallel magnetic fields, which sets up a quadrupole magnetic field configuration for the device as a whole. This quadrupole design is used so that the magnetic field dies off faster (1/r^4, instead of 1/r^3 as with a solenoidal magnetic field). In addition to being safer for the ISS, this faster die-off facilitates faster plasma detachment from the magnetic field lines of the nozzle. The ISS does not have 200 kW of power available for experiments, so a 200 kW battery pack would be charged up over a long period of time (hours to days) and used fire the VF-200 for a shorter period of time (seconds to minutes). Imagine looking up at the ISS flying by at night and seeing a bright blue and magenta kilometer-long plasma rocket plume.

Both the VX-200 and the VF-200 use argon gas as the propellant because of argon's mass and ionization potential. Previous VASIMR prototypes and experiments used hydrogen, deuterium, and neon. Argon is used for the current VASIMR prototypes because it will give an Isp of ~5000s (50,000 m/s). It turns out that this is an optimal Isp for the given LEO orbit, the cost of launching, and the power and weight of VASIMR and related components. A mars mission would likely use a lighter propellant like hydrogen because of the higher Isp obtained with lighter gases.

The reason that VASIMR 'wins' over other ion thrusters, ion engines, and Hall thrusters is that VASIMR can process a huge amount of power and couple that power into a neutral (equal number of ions and electrons) flowing plasma. In this way, VASIMR provides the exhaust velocity and fuel performance of an ion thruster, but produces 10 to 1000 times the thrust typically associated with these thrusters. VASIMR also has the ability to vary the power going to the first or second stage, thus changing from a high-thrust low-velocity exhaust to a lower-thrust higher-velocity exhaust, similar to shifting gears in a car while accelerating. The VX-200 is designed to produce upwards of 5 N of thrust.

The VASIMR program was moved out of the NASA-JSC Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory in late 2007 and into the private lab of the Ad Astra Rocket Company in Webster TX (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXofYP_VfUg&feature=user

* A video from the NASA Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory, the firing of the VX-100.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVsgSjm_vXg

* A video of the new VX-200 vacuum chamber arriving in Houston and being installed in the Ad Astra lab.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvg-Dsh9s2I&feature=user

* A video of a conceptual human Mars mission using 3 Megawatt-class VASIMR engines.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj53rVWK5z0&feature=related

* Mike griffin makes a statement about placing VASIMR on ISS.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1182/1

Exactly. I find this sort of talk a breath of fresh air. It reminds me of Gene Kranz -- the take-no-prisoners, failure-is-not-an-option NASA ground control manager who, among other things, ran the mission control "Tiger Team" during the Apollo 13 disaster.

Musk isn't so much speaking to investors as he is to his own people back in SpaceX. Anyone who watched the video could hear the elation of the crowds at SpaceX, mostly SpaceX employees, as the rocket lifted off the pad, and the renewed cheers with every significant milestone -- Mach 1, Max-Q, etc. You didn't need to be able to see them to picture their faces. I'm sure this was crushing to them. What they need right now isn't generic manager-speak; they need to know that some guy with deep pockets at the top of the company is going to fight like a tiger to keep this thing going until they hit their goal.

There's an interesting article on the Space Review at the moment that outlines how the air freight industry really got started and suggests that a parallel for sub-orbital vehicles might not be completely inconceivable.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1100/1

He wants to cut the VSE budget to use the money for education.

If this happens then the VSE will flounder and it will be the end of human spaceflight. Some of you may think that's a good thing. If you are not one of these people, please, STOP OBAMA.

Back around 1830, when Stephenson's Rocket was the next big thing, there was a strong body of scientific opinion that human beings would explode at speeds above 50 kilometers per hour - assuming that people didn't suffocate first as the air would be sucked out of their lungs!

Even back in the 1830s there were "speed kills" loonies. What next? a warning that you shouldn't go over 25MPH or your eyeballs will come flying out when you try to stop?

"If a relevant percentage of the cost of your orbital rocketry is the cost of your propellants, you're doing something *right*."

Rockets are not expensive because of the energy costs. That's the cheap part. They're expensive because of parts and especially all of the labor -- both for reusable and disposable stages. Labor can indeed be reduced through proper system design. That's why SpaceX's launch pricing is so low. From start to finish, a major driving principle was, "how can we design our rockets and our processes to minimize the number of people that need to be here in order to get this job done quickly and correctly?"

Orion might not be able to but it's not big loss as it will not have much cargo capacity anyway and would be way too expensive to use in this manner even the ESA ATV would be far less costly but the spacex dragon sure will be able to perform automated docking but in automated mode they choose to use the station RMS so they can use the CBM to transfer large cargo that can't fit though the docking ports just like the Japanese H2 vehicle.. The Taurus II Cygnus vehicle also will be able to but it's launch vehicle doesn't exist yet though I think Griffin screwed up again can this guy get anything right as the SS/L 1300 series bus based tug or the spacedev arctus would have been a far lower risk choice. As you can see in the web sites both these craft are vastly superior to cygnus which I believe is much too small to be useful also it's LV uses an engine not currently in production the NK-33 not to mention the launch vehicle the Taurus II is presently vapor ware vs being existing hardware like the EELVs SS/L and spacehab use or presently being constructed like spacex's falcon 9. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1024/1 http://www.arctus-spacecraft.com/