The future of space, at least in the near term, doesn't look so great for astronauts.
If you haven't seen it already, I'd definitely suggest reading through this piece by aerospace engineer Rand Simberg (of transterrestrial.com) over at the NRO, titled, "Obama's Space Program: More Conservative than Bush's -- America has never had a space policy more visionary or more friendly to private enterprise." Of course, the National Review has plenty of issues, but the piece itself is quite well-written and a strong defense of the new plan for NASA:
The new plan gives us redundant capabilities to get people to orbit, and competition among the multiple providers will drive down prices not just for NASA but for everyone, including those who want to use Bob Bigelow's orbital facilities for business or pleasure. It will develop, finally, the technologies needed to reduce the costs of going beyond Earth orbit as well. It will open up space not just for NASA astronauts but for all, Americans and others, to seek their own dreams there. It may be intrinsically unconservative to have a federal human-spaceflight program in the first place, but politics would seem to dictate that it's going to continue. If so, don't we want to see that money spent on a more effective, more conservative, and fundamentally American approach to opening up space? If so, then Obama's space program beats the previous one, which was based on the anachronistic Apollo model.
The new policy isn't perfect. I would have preferred that the president not be so openly dismissive of the moon. "Been there, done that" is not a sound basis for selection of goals. Besides, we barely scratched the surface and haven't yet done a proper assessment of the possibilities of using its resources for further reductions in transportation costs (something that the VSE got right -- unfortunately, the technology was starved by Mike Griffin's Ares overruns). But that doesn't matter right now. If we can finally get on with the business of letting private industry take on the (literally) mundane task of getting people only 200 miles above and let NASA focus on new technologies, there is plenty of time over the next few years to decide exactly where to go from there -- and Barack Obama will not be involved in that decision. The important thing is that we had to euthanize NASA's expensive, unneeded new rockets and move on to the more critical development of opening up space. We're now on a path to do so, assuming that Obama's plan survives Congress.
Many don't trust President Obama to execute this policy along these lines. Neither do I, necessarily. But I'd rather have good policy poorly executed than poor policy well executed. The execution can always be improved later. Do I believe that Obama really cares as much about human spaceflight as he said in his speech at the Cape? No, and I think that's a good thing. I think he sees NASA as a problem he inherited from George W. Bush, and in that, he is right for once. He assigned to the problem people who do care about getting humans into space and, like Bush, he now wants to move on to other matters. Really, we should fear the day he gets interested in spaceflight; that will be the day that private enterprise is no longer trusted to conduct it. Let's hope that day never comes. In the meantime, remember that when government does the right thing, it doesn't matter whether it's done for the wrong reason. Whatever the motivations behind it, this is a much more visionary space policy than we've ever had before.
No amount of screaming "the reds are under the beds!!" is going to bring back the unique set of cold war circumstances that made Apollo a success.
They certainly try, though. In fact, Congressman Todd Arkin (R-Missouri) made the absurd claim today that NASA's new plan would force the US to become reliant on the Soviet Union:
Do you really want private companies going to the Moon and commercializing it?
Yes please, as rapidly as possible. Coincidentally, a couple days ago space.com had an interview with construction billionaire Robert Bigelow (who currently has two prototype space stations in orbit, which he launched on his own dime). In the interview he discussed his plans for a private lunar base, which would be assembled from three of his space station modules in lunar orbit or a Lagrangian point, then land assembled on the lunar surface:
After launching two prototype space stations into orbit, space entrepreneur and pioneer Robert Bigelow is now setting his sights a bit higher. His latest vision: A quick-deploy moon base capable of housing up to 18 astronauts in inflatable modules on the lunar surface.
The base itself would be fabricated in space, with consideration being given to crewmembers piloting the entire base directly onto the moon's surface....
"We need to make low-Earth orbit work first before we go beyond . . . but I believe we will," Gold told SPACE.com. "Once we've established a robust infrastructure in Earth orbit, created the economies of scale necessary to produce facilities in low Earth orbit . . . at that point, we've really enabled ourselves to look at a variety of options."
Bigelow's main limiting factor has been the lack of a commercial crew vehicle to transfer customers to his space stations, and NASA's newly-announced commercial crew initiative will solve that problem. Once Bigelow's LEO bases have proven themselves, a private lunar base will be able to take advantage of the propellant depots in LEO and Lagrangian points foreseen under the new NASA plans.
I'm surprised that with all the recent news of NASA being marginalized that they can still have competitions like this? Or have I just got the wrong impression of the state of NASA's future?
As QuantumG said, you should probably read better news sources.;) NASA's budget is actually being increased under the FY2011 budget, which you can read here:
Although all of NASA is getting an overall boost, the Centennial Challenges prize competitions like the ones in the summary are getting a particularly large boost. I believe they only got $4 million in FY09 and $0 in FY10 (yay for Ares cost overruns eating everything else in the budget), but from FY2011-FY2015 Centennial Challenges is getting a whopping $10 million per year ($50 million total). You can do some pretty amazing things with that. From the NASA budget:
The Centennial Challenges program seeks innovative solutions to technical problems that can drive progress in aerospace technology of value to NASA's missions in space operations, science, exploration and aeronautics. Beginning in FY 2011, Centennial Challenge activities associated with the Innovative Partnerships Program are transferred to the Space Technology Program. Centennial Challenges encourage the participation of independent teams, individual inventors, student groups and private companies of all sizes in aerospace research and development, and seek to find the most innovative solutions to technical challenges through competition and cooperation. NASA's original seven prize challenges have been successful in encouraging broad participation by innovators across our nation and across generations. Many of these technical challenges also have direct relevance to national and global needs such as energy and transportation.
Prize programs encourage diverse participation and multiple solution paths. A measure of diversity is seen in the geographic distribution of participants (from Hawaii to Maine) that reaches far beyond the locales of the NASA Centers and major aerospace industries. The participating teams have included individual inventors, small startup companies, and university students and professors. An example of multiple solution paths was seen in the 2009 Regolith Excavation Challenge. NASA can typically afford one or two working prototypes in a development program but at this Challenge event, over twenty different working prototypes were demonstrated for the NASA technologists. All of these prototypes were developed at no cost to the government. For three years of competitions with dozens of teams investing tens of thousands of hours, NASA spent only $750,000 in prize money.
The return on investment with prizes is exceptionally high as NASA expends no funds unless the accomplishment is demonstrated. NASA provides only the prize money and the administration of the competitions is done at no cost to NASA by non-profit allied organizations. For the Lunar Lander Challenge, twelve private teams spent nearly 70,000 hours and the equivalent of $12 million trying to win $2 million in prize money. Prizes also focus public attention on NASA programs and generate interest in science and engineering. Live webcasts of Centennial Challenge competitions attract thousands of viewers across the nation and around the world. The 2009 Power Beaming completion resulted in over 100 news articles and web features. Prizes also create new businesses and new partners for NASA. The winner of the 2007 Astronaut Glove Challenge started a new business to manufacture pressure suit gloves. Armadillo Aerospace began a partnership with NASA related to the reusable rocket engine that they developed for the Lunar Lander Challenge, and they
The budget cuts at NASA apparently keep them earthbound and working on earth crawlers
Uh, NASA's FY2011 budget just got a substantial boost, not a cut. At least, it'll be a boost if the President has his way, and Congress doesn't end up cutting it down.
I suspect that April 12th launch will be pushed hard, AF will give the go ahead, and NASA will award COTsD to SpaceX on the 15th at the Obama Florida meeting.
IMHO, I'm not so sure that would be a good idea and would be grossly unfair to the other competitors. Much of the reason for going with the new plans is to promote a competitive marketplace in spaceflight and transition away from the political favoritism which dominated programs like Constellation. Having the President single out a particular competitor like SpaceX would be somewhat contrary to that notion.
Nasa is a government agency. By definition, it is a bureaucracy. By definition, all its employees are government officials... aka, bureaucrats... You need to realize that the more a government agency contracts out its tasks, the more and more the agency becomes comprised of the red tape machine, and less and less of it are people who do the agency's work.
Sure, you can't necessarily reduce the proportion of bureaucracy at NASA, pretty much by definition. However, what you can do is reduce portion of bureaucracy in the aerospace industry as a whole, allowing the same number of bureaucrats to help facilitate a much larger amount of aerospace activity. Also, the transition from cost-plus contracts (where profits are guaranteed but there's massive amounts of paperwork) to fixed-price contracts (where the company takes greater risk but with MUCH less bureaucracy, paperwork, and overall cost involved) will help substantially.
2) Will NASA do the research on fundamentally new technologies? I suspect not here either, since that would require handing NASA money year after year with no real return. (when you're getting money to do research, you have a powerful incentive to never actually finish your research)
Robert Braun, the new NASA Chief Technologist (and well-regarded expert in aerospace and planetary exploration technologies) gave a talk last week which gives a good overview on how NASA's research on "fundamentally new technologies" will work out:
Addressing your concerns, the new plans are much more return-oriented in the immediate future than the old plans, with hundreds of "early stage innovation" projects with a 6 month-2 year duration starting in 2011, 10-20 "game changing technology" projects with 2 year duration, and 3-8 "crosscutting capability demonstrations" with 3 year project duration, and in-space demonstrations of technologies like in-orbit propellant depots and in-situ resource utilization by 2014.
Here's a list of the topics (not all-inclusive) the new technology programs are planning on researching and producing results on in the next few years (not including exploration tech demos, which make up an equally large part of the budget). It's also worth noting that almost all of these topics would have been ignored by NASA under Constellation:
Early Stage Innovation -Computational Materials Design, Nanotube Based Structural Materials, High Bandwidth Communications, Lightweight Low Transit Volume Space Structures, Non- Chemical In-Space Propulsion, Coatings and Adhesives, Flexible Power Arrays, Microwave/Laser Power Transmission, Energy Storage Systems, Space Robotic Assembly and Fabrication, Formation Flying Spacecraft Systems (Swarm Operations), Nonconventional Access to Space, Print Manufacturing and Rapid 3D Prototyping, Extreme Environment (Temperature/Radiation) Sensors and Mechanisms, Climate Sensors, Planetary Entry Decelerators, Reliable and Affordable Exploration Systems, Advanced Radiation Shielding Materials (Techniques and Systems), Safe Despin/Detumble Approaches for Large Non-operational Spacecraft, Material/Structural Concepts to Mitigate Impact of Small Debris, and Precision Timing and Navigation Using Only Celestial Objects
Game Changing Technology -Advanced lightweight structures and materials, advanced in-space propulsion, nano- propellants, lightweight large aperture antennas and telescopes, power generation/transmission, surface robotic construction, energy storage, high bandwidth communications, and small satellite subsystem technology
Note that Constellation wasn't axed because it was "lackluster". It was axed because it was the previous President's program.
Incorrect. It was cancelled because, as the independent review by the aerospace experts on the Augustine Committee found, Constellation offered "little or no apparent value" despite the tens/hundreds of billions of dollars which would be spent on it through 2030.
That, and Constellation would have been unable to accomplish even ONE of the objectives set forth in Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration:
The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program. In support of this goal, the United States will: * Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond; * Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations; * Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and * Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.
Are most air-data booms attached to the load-bearing super-structure like that? Does the Shuttle's air data boom extend through the Thermal Protection system of the nose -- the hottest are of the TPS during re-entry? No and no.
I hate to say this since I can't reference them, but in the past there were more photos of X-37 on-line and the boom very clearly is an integral part of the green superstructure, with the mechanism running the entire length of the craft.
Very interesting points, although by its very nature we unfortunately can't really conclude very much one way or another right now.
Do you know where I could find more info on ablative reentry spikes? I've been reading space-related sites for a while, and I'm surprised I haven't heard about them previously, but the idea seems to make a lot of sense.
I think you should read more carefully the Augustine report (the independent review panel). Its conclusions were quite different from what seems to emerge as the current "plan". Most importantly, none of the alternatives proposed included cancelling constellation as a whole - probably because it didn't make sense to them.
Quite a few options suggested by the Augustine Committee suggested getting rid of the Ares I and Ares V, and they were ambivalent at best about Orion.
Earth to LEO: * COTS/CCDev (Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX, Orbital, etc.) * DIRECT
LEO to Lagrange/Moon/asteroids/Mars/etc * Earth Departure Stage, typically based on LH2/LO2, like the ULA's ACES or whatever DIRECT uses * hypergolics * using in-orbit refueling (either direct refueling or propellant depots) with either LH2/LO2 or hypergolics * VASIMR
The point behind the new plans for NASA is that many of these ideas will be developed and tested in parallel, and the ones which work better in practice will be used for actual missions.
So no this project is not secret. It is an USAF project being handled by DARPA, but it is not secret.
There are many different types of secret (and let's not even start on the different types of Secret). In this case, the minimum details are known, but nobody outside of the classified world actually knows what technologies will be tested on the X-37B or what it'll be doing during its up to 270 days in orbit, and no interviews are permitted.
On a side note, another cool semi-secret project is the Lockheed Martin Revolver, which is generally thought to be a prototype of a flyback first-stage booster. This means that the first stage can come back and land after it boosts the rest of the rocket up, allowing for it to be easily reused.
(The last case on the news - a driver called 911 on his cell phone because his car was accelerating out of control. When prompted by the operator if he had tried putting the car in Neutral, he said no and even refused to do so when ordered to do it by the operator.)
It's starting to look increasingly likely that this latest case was a hoax:
On March 8, 2010, a 2008 Prius allegedly uncontrollably accelerated to 94 miles per hour on a California Highway (US), and the Prius had to be stopped with the verbal assistance of the California Highway Patrol as news cameras watched [86]. Subsequent to the event, media investigations uncovered suspicious information about the alleged runaway Prius driver, 61-year old James Sikes, including false police reports, suspect insurance claims, theft and fraud allegations, television aspirations, and bankruptcy.[87][88] Sikes was found to be US$19,000 behind in his Prius car payments and had $US700,000 in accumulated debt.[87] Sikes stated he wanted a new car as compensation for the incident.[87][89] Analyses by Edmunds.com and Forbes found Sikes' acceleration claims and fears of shifting to neutral implausible, with Edmunds concluding that "in other words, this is BS",[90] and Forbes comparing it to the balloon boy hoax.[88]
Better go look at the budget. Obama's budget *increases* NASA spending while removing its most visible mission. Basically, he plans on creating the next Lockheed or Boeing at taxpayer expense.
Quite the opposite, actually. The current Constellation program favors cost-plus non-competitive contracts, while the new plan uses fixed-price commercial contracts with multiple companies competing and developing in parallel, with companies only getting paid for meeting milestones. For example, a number of companies are currently under "CCDev" contracts for developing commercial crew vehicles and technologies, and only get paid the full amount if they meet all of their milestones by the end of 2010. You can read more about this in the budget documents:
For some reason this only got posted to the politics.slashdot page (where it's gotten all of 2 comments), but since I figured others would be interested in learning more I'll re-post the details here, with relevant links included:
The White House has announced that on April 15 the President will be visiting Florida to host a conference on the Administration's 'new vision for America's future in space,' which is focused on developing new technologies and capabilities needed for sustainable exploration of 'the Moon, asteroids, and eventually Mars.' The White House's plans for reinvigorating NASA are facing vocal opposition from several congressmen in Florida, Texas, and Alabama, due to its outright cancellation of the Constellation/Ares program, which was found to be 'fundamentally un-executable' but is/was an important source of jobs in many areas.
... The President courageously decided to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015. And he directed NASA to spend a billion per year on buying rides for American astronauts aboard new, commercially developed space vehicles-that's American space vehicles. Other NASA funds will go into developing and testing new revolutionary technologies that we can use in living and working on Mars and its moons.... For the past six years America's civil space program has been aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. That's the plan announced by President George W. Bush in January of 2004. That plan also called for developing the technologies that would support human expeditions to Mars, our ultimate destination in space. But two things happened along the way since that announcement, which became known as the Vision for Space Exploration.
First, the President failed to fully fund the program, as he had initially promised. As a result, each year the development of the rockets and spacecraft called for in the plan slipped further and further behind. Second and most importantly, NASA virtually eliminated the technology development effort for advanced space systems. Equally as bad, NASA also raided the Earth and space science budgets in the struggle to keep the program, named Project Constellation, on track. Even that effort fell short.
To keep the focus on the return to the Moon, NASA pretty much abandoned all hope of preparing for Mars exploration. It looked like building bases on the Moon would consume all of NASA's resources. Yet despite much complaining, neither a Republican-controlled nor a Democratic-controlled Congress was willing or able to add back those missing and needed funds. The date of the so-called return to the Moon slipped from 2020 to heaven-knows when. At the same time, there was no money to either extend the life of the Space Shuttle, due to be retired this year, or that of the International Space Station, due to be dropped into the Pacific Ocean in 2015, a scant handful of years after it was completed.
Enter the new Obama administration. Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official. Augustine's team took testimony and presentations from many people with ideas on what way forward NASA should take (that group included me). In October, it presented its report to the President and to Dr. John Holdren, Obama's science advisor and a friend and colleague of mine. The report strongly suggested the nation move away from the troubled rocket program, called Ares 1, and both extend the life of the space station and develop commercial ways of sending astronauts and cargoes up to the station. And it suggested a better way to spend our taxpayer dollars would be not focused on the Moon race, but on something it called a "Flexible Path." Flexible in the sense that it would redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons. Many different destinations and missions would be enabled by that approach, not just one.
But with the limited NASA budget consumed by the Moon, no funds were available for this development effort -- until now. Now President Obama has signaled that new direction -- what
Your comment gave me a random thought: Why aren't there any sellers of combined health+life insurance? The health payments could deduct from the life insurance amount, and the insurer would also have an extra incentive to keep you alive so that they don't have to immediately pay the life insurance amount.
That would be very interesting indeed! I suppose that would require that it be patchy rather than uniformly distributed. Because it's certainly not taking up even a couple percent of the north pole image that they showed in a manner that's that thick and relatively pure; there's just too much area for that compared to their cited mass figure.
I was taking a look at this image which Paul Spudis posted, specifically the middle "CPR" image:
I assume that the regions where it's >= 2 meters thick corresponds to the reddest regions, of which there are only a few speckles. It also makes sense when you consider that large amounts of lunar ice are likely to only persist in those parts of the crater which are in permanent shadow.
Also, as a practical matter, it's worth noting that these craters are some of the coldest spots in the solar system. It'll require some clever engineering to work in an environment with a temperature even colder than liquid nitrogen.
Can someone tell me why the ice doesn't just turn to gas and vent to space?
It's really, really cold in these craters -- they're actually some of the coldest spots in the solar system, at -400F (-240 degrees celsius or a little higher than 30 Kelvin). Ice can remain there for billions of years without sublimation. Heck, you could probably store liquid nitrogen in these craters.
As for the ice issue: 600m metric tons at the "north pole". They say it's within green circles that look to take up something like 4% of the image. The area covered is down to 80N. The moon's circumference is 6790 miles. I'm too lazy to do the exact math, but that means that the area covered here is something like 550,000 square miles. That means that the area taken up by the green circles is something like 22,000 square miles, so about 27,000 metric tons per square mile. Mini-SAR measures to a depth of "a few meters"; let's say 10 feet. That would work out to about 100 grams of water per cubic foot in those areas. A cubic foot of regolith has a mass of something like 75 kilograms, so that would be about 0.13% water. These are very rough calculations, of course.
This certainly requires more investigation, but Paul Spudis, the scientist in charge of the experiment, posted the following on his blog, indicating that the evidence supports there being relatively pure ice at least 2 meters thick:
Over forty small (2-15 km diameter) craters near the north pole of the Moon are found to contain this elevated CPR material. The total mount of ice present at the pole depends on how thick it is; to see this elevated CPR effect, the ice must have a thickness on the order of tens of wavelengths of the radar used. Our radar wavelength is 12.6 cm, therefore we think that the ice must be at least two meters thick and relatively pure. At such a thickness, more than 600 million metric tones of water ice are present in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
The future of space, at least in the near term, doesn't look so great for astronauts.
If you haven't seen it already, I'd definitely suggest reading through this piece by aerospace engineer Rand Simberg (of transterrestrial.com) over at the NRO, titled, "Obama's Space Program: More Conservative than Bush's -- America has never had a space policy more visionary or more friendly to private enterprise." Of course, the National Review has plenty of issues, but the piece itself is quite well-written and a strong defense of the new plan for NASA:
http://article.nationalreview.com/432073/obamas-space-program-more-conservative-than-bushs/rand-simberg
The new plan gives us redundant capabilities to get people to orbit, and competition among the multiple providers will drive down prices not just for NASA but for everyone, including those who want to use Bob Bigelow's orbital facilities for business or pleasure. It will develop, finally, the technologies needed to reduce the costs of going beyond Earth orbit as well. It will open up space not just for NASA astronauts but for all, Americans and others, to seek their own dreams there. It may be intrinsically unconservative to have a federal human-spaceflight program in the first place, but politics would seem to dictate that it's going to continue. If so, don't we want to see that money spent on a more effective, more conservative, and fundamentally American approach to opening up space? If so, then Obama's space program beats the previous one, which was based on the anachronistic Apollo model.
The new policy isn't perfect. I would have preferred that the president not be so openly dismissive of the moon. "Been there, done that" is not a sound basis for selection of goals. Besides, we barely scratched the surface and haven't yet done a proper assessment of the possibilities of using its resources for further reductions in transportation costs (something that the VSE got right -- unfortunately, the technology was starved by Mike Griffin's Ares overruns). But that doesn't matter right now. If we can finally get on with the business of letting private industry take on the (literally) mundane task of getting people only 200 miles above and let NASA focus on new technologies, there is plenty of time over the next few years to decide exactly where to go from there -- and Barack Obama will not be involved in that decision. The important thing is that we had to euthanize NASA's expensive, unneeded new rockets and move on to the more critical development of opening up space. We're now on a path to do so, assuming that Obama's plan survives Congress.
Many don't trust President Obama to execute this policy along these lines. Neither do I, necessarily. But I'd rather have good policy poorly executed than poor policy well executed. The execution can always be improved later. Do I believe that Obama really cares as much about human spaceflight as he said in his speech at the Cape? No, and I think that's a good thing. I think he sees NASA as a problem he inherited from George W. Bush, and in that, he is right for once. He assigned to the problem people who do care about getting humans into space and, like Bush, he now wants to move on to other matters. Really, we should fear the day he gets interested in spaceflight; that will be the day that private enterprise is no longer trusted to conduct it. Let's hope that day never comes. In the meantime, remember that when government does the right thing, it doesn't matter whether it's done for the wrong reason. Whatever the motivations behind it, this is a much more visionary space policy than we've ever had before.
No amount of screaming "the reds are under the beds!!" is going to bring back the unique set of cold war circumstances that made Apollo a success.
They certainly try, though. In fact, Congressman Todd Arkin (R-Missouri) made the absurd claim today that NASA's new plan would force the US to become reliant on the Soviet Union:
http://www.goodporkbadpork.com/2010/04/missouri-congressman-mistakenly-refers-to-soviet-union-in-anti-obama-space-policy-press-release/
Do you really want private companies going to the Moon and commercializing it?
Yes please, as rapidly as possible. Coincidentally, a couple days ago space.com had an interview with construction billionaire Robert Bigelow (who currently has two prototype space stations in orbit, which he launched on his own dime). In the interview he discussed his plans for a private lunar base, which would be assembled from three of his space station modules in lunar orbit or a Lagrangian point, then land assembled on the lunar surface:
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/private-moon-bases-bigelow-aerospace-100414.html
After launching two prototype space stations into orbit, space entrepreneur and pioneer Robert Bigelow is now setting his sights a bit higher. His latest vision: A quick-deploy moon base capable of housing up to 18 astronauts in inflatable modules on the lunar surface.
The base itself would be fabricated in space, with consideration being given to crewmembers piloting the entire base directly onto the moon's surface. ...
"We need to make low-Earth orbit work first before we go beyond . . . but I believe we will," Gold told SPACE.com. "Once we've established a robust infrastructure in Earth orbit, created the economies of scale necessary to produce facilities in low Earth orbit . . . at that point, we've really enabled ourselves to look at a variety of options."
Bigelow's main limiting factor has been the lack of a commercial crew vehicle to transfer customers to his space stations, and NASA's newly-announced commercial crew initiative will solve that problem. Once Bigelow's LEO bases have proven themselves, a private lunar base will be able to take advantage of the propellant depots in LEO and Lagrangian points foreseen under the new NASA plans.
I'm surprised that with all the recent news of NASA being marginalized that they can still have competitions like this? Or have I just got the wrong impression of the state of NASA's future?
As QuantumG said, you should probably read better news sources. ;) NASA's budget is actually being increased under the FY2011 budget, which you can read here:
http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html
Although all of NASA is getting an overall boost, the Centennial Challenges prize competitions like the ones in the summary are getting a particularly large boost. I believe they only got $4 million in FY09 and $0 in FY10 (yay for Ares cost overruns eating everything else in the budget), but from FY2011-FY2015 Centennial Challenges is getting a whopping $10 million per year ($50 million total). You can do some pretty amazing things with that. From the NASA budget:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428439main_Space_technology.pdf
The Centennial Challenges program seeks innovative solutions to technical problems that can drive
progress in aerospace technology of value to NASA's missions in space operations, science,
exploration and aeronautics. Beginning in FY 2011, Centennial Challenge activities associated with
the Innovative Partnerships Program are transferred to the Space Technology Program. Centennial
Challenges encourage the participation of independent teams, individual inventors, student groups
and private companies of all sizes in aerospace research and development, and seek to find the
most innovative solutions to technical challenges through competition and cooperation. NASA's
original seven prize challenges have been successful in encouraging broad participation by
innovators across our nation and across generations. Many of these technical challenges also have
direct relevance to national and global needs such as energy and transportation.
Prize programs encourage diverse participation and multiple solution paths. A measure of diversity is seen in the geographic distribution of participants (from Hawaii to Maine) that reaches far beyond the locales of the NASA Centers and major aerospace industries. The participating teams have included
individual inventors, small startup companies, and university students and professors. An example of multiple solution paths was seen in the 2009 Regolith Excavation Challenge. NASA can typically
afford one or two working prototypes in a development program but at this Challenge event, over
twenty different working prototypes were demonstrated for the NASA technologists. All of these
prototypes were developed at no cost to the government. For three years of competitions with
dozens of teams investing tens of thousands of hours, NASA spent only $750,000 in prize money.
The return on investment with prizes is exceptionally high as NASA expends no funds unless the
accomplishment is demonstrated. NASA provides only the prize money and the administration of the
competitions is done at no cost to NASA by non-profit allied organizations. For the Lunar Lander
Challenge, twelve private teams spent nearly 70,000 hours and the equivalent of $12 million trying to win $2 million in prize money. Prizes also focus public attention on NASA programs and generate
interest in science and engineering. Live webcasts of Centennial Challenge competitions attract
thousands of viewers across the nation and around the world. The 2009 Power Beaming completion
resulted in over 100 news articles and web features. Prizes also create new businesses and new
partners for NASA. The winner of the 2007 Astronaut Glove Challenge started a new business to
manufacture pressure suit gloves. Armadillo Aerospace began a partnership with NASA related to
the reusable rocket engine that they developed for the Lunar Lander Challenge, and they
The budget cuts at NASA apparently keep them earthbound and working on earth crawlers
Uh, NASA's FY2011 budget just got a substantial boost, not a cut. At least, it'll be a boost if the President has his way, and Congress doesn't end up cutting it down.
I suspect that April 12th launch will be pushed hard, AF will give the go ahead, and NASA will award COTsD to SpaceX on the 15th at the Obama Florida meeting.
IMHO, I'm not so sure that would be a good idea and would be grossly unfair to the other competitors. Much of the reason for going with the new plans is to promote a competitive marketplace in spaceflight and transition away from the political favoritism which dominated programs like Constellation. Having the President single out a particular competitor like SpaceX would be somewhat contrary to that notion.
Nasa is a government agency. By definition, it is a bureaucracy. By definition, all its employees are government officials... aka, bureaucrats... You need to realize that the more a government agency contracts out its tasks, the more and more the agency becomes comprised of the red tape machine, and less and less of it are people who do the agency's work.
Sure, you can't necessarily reduce the proportion of bureaucracy at NASA, pretty much by definition. However, what you can do is reduce portion of bureaucracy in the aerospace industry as a whole, allowing the same number of bureaucrats to help facilitate a much larger amount of aerospace activity. Also, the transition from cost-plus contracts (where profits are guaranteed but there's massive amounts of paperwork) to fixed-price contracts (where the company takes greater risk but with MUCH less bureaucracy, paperwork, and overall cost involved) will help substantially.
2) Will NASA do the research on fundamentally new technologies? I suspect not here either, since that would require handing NASA money year after year with no real return. (when you're getting money to do research, you have a powerful incentive to never actually finish your research)
Robert Braun, the new NASA Chief Technologist (and well-regarded expert in aerospace and planetary exploration technologies) gave a talk last week which gives a good overview on how NASA's research on "fundamentally new technologies" will work out:
http://spacepolicyonline.com/pages/images/stories/Braun_-_NASA_OCT_March_9_ASEB.pdf
Addressing your concerns, the new plans are much more return-oriented in the immediate future than the old plans, with hundreds of "early stage innovation" projects with a 6 month-2 year duration starting in 2011, 10-20 "game changing technology" projects with 2 year duration, and 3-8 "crosscutting capability demonstrations" with 3 year project duration, and in-space demonstrations of technologies like in-orbit propellant depots and in-situ resource utilization by 2014.
Here's a list of the topics (not all-inclusive) the new technology programs are planning on researching and producing results on in the next few years (not including exploration tech demos, which make up an equally large part of the budget). It's also worth noting that almost all of these topics would have been ignored by NASA under Constellation:
Early Stage Innovation
-Computational Materials Design, Nanotube Based Structural Materials, High Bandwidth Communications, Lightweight Low Transit Volume Space Structures, Non- Chemical In-Space Propulsion, Coatings and Adhesives, Flexible Power Arrays, Microwave/Laser Power Transmission, Energy Storage Systems, Space Robotic Assembly and Fabrication, Formation Flying Spacecraft Systems (Swarm Operations), Nonconventional Access to Space, Print Manufacturing and Rapid 3D Prototyping, Extreme Environment (Temperature/Radiation) Sensors and Mechanisms, Climate Sensors, Planetary Entry Decelerators, Reliable and Affordable Exploration Systems, Advanced Radiation Shielding Materials (Techniques and Systems), Safe Despin/Detumble Approaches for Large Non-operational Spacecraft, Material/Structural Concepts to Mitigate Impact of Small Debris, and Precision Timing and Navigation Using Only Celestial Objects
Game Changing Technology
-Advanced lightweight structures and materials, advanced in-space propulsion, nano- propellants, lightweight large aperture antennas and telescopes, power generation/transmission, surface robotic construction, energy storage, high bandwidth communications, and small satellite subsystem technology
Crosscutting Capability Demonstrations
-Optical communications, aerocapture, supersonic and hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerators, formation flying, advanced in-space propulsion
Note that Constellation wasn't axed because it was "lackluster". It was axed because it was the previous President's program.
Incorrect. It was cancelled because, as the independent review by the aerospace experts on the Augustine Committee found, Constellation offered "little or no apparent value" despite the tens/hundreds of billions of dollars which would be spent on it through 2030.
That, and Constellation would have been unable to accomplish even ONE of the objectives set forth in Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/55583main_vision_space_exploration2.pdf
The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program. In support of this goal, the United States will:
* Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and
beyond;
* Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;
* Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and
* Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.
Are most air-data booms attached to the load-bearing super-structure like that?
Does the Shuttle's air data boom extend through the Thermal Protection system of the nose -- the hottest are of the TPS during re-entry?
No and no.
I hate to say this since I can't reference them, but in the past there were more photos of X-37 on-line and the boom very clearly is an integral part of the green superstructure, with the mechanism running the entire length of the craft.
Very interesting points, although by its very nature we unfortunately can't really conclude very much one way or another right now.
I asked about it elsewhere, and it's probably just an air data boom, often used on test aircraft. Here's an image of one on the Space Shuttle:
http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/fullimage.jsp?searchpage=true&keywords=enterprise&textsearch=Go&hitsperpage=30&pageno=2&photoId=S77-28140
Do you know where I could find more info on ablative reentry spikes? I've been reading space-related sites for a while, and I'm surprised I haven't heard about them previously, but the idea seems to make a lot of sense.
I think you should read more carefully the Augustine report (the independent review panel). Its conclusions were quite different from what seems to emerge as the current "plan". Most importantly, none of the alternatives proposed included cancelling constellation as a whole - probably because it didn't make sense to them.
Quite a few options suggested by the Augustine Committee suggested getting rid of the Ares I and Ares V, and they were ambivalent at best about Orion.
What no one has discussed, either in the pro Constellation crowd or those against, is what the propulsion package will be for Flexible Path.
Oh, there's been plenty of discussion about it, just check out the forums over at http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/
The options are pretty much as follows:
Earth to LEO:
* COTS/CCDev (Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX, Orbital, etc.)
* DIRECT
LEO to Lagrange/Moon/asteroids/Mars/etc
* Earth Departure Stage, typically based on LH2/LO2, like the ULA's ACES or whatever DIRECT uses
* hypergolics
* using in-orbit refueling (either direct refueling or propellant depots) with either LH2/LO2 or hypergolics
* VASIMR
The point behind the new plans for NASA is that many of these ideas will be developed and tested in parallel, and the ones which work better in practice will be used for actual missions.
So no this project is not secret. It is an USAF project being handled by DARPA, but it is not secret.
There are many different types of secret (and let's not even start on the different types of Secret). In this case, the minimum details are known, but nobody outside of the classified world actually knows what technologies will be tested on the X-37B or what it'll be doing during its up to 270 days in orbit, and no interviews are permitted.
On a side note, another cool semi-secret project is the Lockheed Martin Revolver, which is generally thought to be a prototype of a flyback first-stage booster. This means that the first stage can come back and land after it boosts the rest of the rocket up, allowing for it to be easily reused.
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/hyperbola/2010/03/lockheed-trademarks-revolver-f.html
Some interesting patents: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=12755.msg556730#msg556730
(The last case on the news - a driver called 911 on his cell phone because his car was accelerating out of control. When prompted by the operator if he had tried putting the car in Neutral, he said no and even refused to do so when ordered to do it by the operator.)
It's starting to look increasingly likely that this latest case was a hoax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius#Brake_fix_and_acceleration
On March 8, 2010, a 2008 Prius allegedly uncontrollably accelerated to 94 miles per hour on a California Highway (US), and the Prius had to be stopped with the verbal assistance of the California Highway Patrol as news cameras watched [86]. Subsequent to the event, media investigations uncovered suspicious information about the alleged runaway Prius driver, 61-year old James Sikes, including false police reports, suspect insurance claims, theft and fraud allegations, television aspirations, and bankruptcy.[87][88] Sikes was found to be US$19,000 behind in his Prius car payments and had $US700,000 in accumulated debt.[87] Sikes stated he wanted a new car as compensation for the incident.[87][89] Analyses by Edmunds.com and Forbes found Sikes' acceleration claims and fears of shifting to neutral implausible, with Edmunds concluding that "in other words, this is BS",[90] and Forbes comparing it to the balloon boy hoax.[88]
Buzz Aldrin is a well known gadfly
Are you going to back up that attack, or did you just feel in the mood for smearing Buzz Aldrin because you disagree with him?
Better go look at the budget. Obama's budget *increases* NASA spending while removing its most visible mission. Basically, he plans on creating the next Lockheed or Boeing at taxpayer expense.
Quite the opposite, actually. The current Constellation program favors cost-plus non-competitive contracts, while the new plan uses fixed-price commercial contracts with multiple companies competing and developing in parallel, with companies only getting paid for meeting milestones. For example, a number of companies are currently under "CCDev" contracts for developing commercial crew vehicles and technologies, and only get paid the full amount if they meet all of their milestones by the end of 2010. You can read more about this in the budget documents:
http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428356main_Exploration.pdf
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428356main_Exploration.pdf
For some reason this only got posted to the politics.slashdot page (where it's gotten all of 2 comments), but since I figured others would be interested in learning more I'll re-post the details here, with relevant links included:
The White House has announced that on April 15 the President will be visiting Florida to host a conference on the Administration's 'new vision for America's future in space,' which is focused on developing new technologies and capabilities needed for sustainable exploration of 'the Moon, asteroids, and eventually Mars.' The White House's plans for reinvigorating NASA are facing vocal opposition from several congressmen in Florida, Texas, and Alabama, due to its outright cancellation of the Constellation/Ares program, which was found to be 'fundamentally un-executable' but is/was an important source of jobs in many areas.
It's rather interesting that Buzz Aldrin has a completely opposite view of the new plan:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/president-obamas-jfk-mome_b_448667.html
... The President courageously decided to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015. And he directed NASA to spend a billion per year on buying rides for American astronauts aboard new, commercially developed space vehicles-that's American space vehicles. Other NASA funds will go into developing and testing new revolutionary technologies that we can use in living and working on Mars and its moons. ... For the past six years America's civil space program has been aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. That's the plan announced by President George W. Bush in January of 2004. That plan also called for developing the technologies that would support human expeditions to Mars, our ultimate destination in space. But two things happened along the way since that announcement, which became known as the Vision for Space Exploration.
First, the President failed to fully fund the program, as he had initially promised. As a result, each year the development of the rockets and spacecraft called for in the plan slipped further and further behind. Second and most importantly, NASA virtually eliminated the technology development effort for advanced space systems. Equally as bad, NASA also raided the Earth and space science budgets in the struggle to keep the program, named Project Constellation, on track. Even that effort fell short.
To keep the focus on the return to the Moon, NASA pretty much abandoned all hope of preparing for Mars exploration. It looked like building bases on the Moon would consume all of NASA's resources. Yet despite much complaining, neither a Republican-controlled nor a Democratic-controlled Congress was willing or able to add back those missing and needed funds. The date of the so-called return to the Moon slipped from 2020 to heaven-knows when. At the same time, there was no money to either extend the life of the Space Shuttle, due to be retired this year, or that of the International Space Station, due to be dropped into the Pacific Ocean in 2015, a scant handful of years after it was completed.
Enter the new Obama administration. Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official. Augustine's team took testimony and presentations from many people with ideas on what way forward NASA should take (that group included me). In October, it presented its report to the President and to Dr. John Holdren, Obama's science advisor and a friend and colleague of mine. The report strongly suggested the nation move away from the troubled rocket program, called Ares 1, and both extend the life of the space station and develop commercial ways of sending astronauts and cargoes up to the station. And it suggested a better way to spend our taxpayer dollars would be not focused on the Moon race, but on something it called a "Flexible Path." Flexible in the sense that it would redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons. Many different destinations and missions would be enabled by that approach, not just one.
But with the limited NASA budget consumed by the Moon, no funds were available for this development effort -- until now. Now President Obama has signaled that new direction -- what
Your comment gave me a random thought: Why aren't there any sellers of combined health+life insurance? The health payments could deduct from the life insurance amount, and the insurer would also have an extra incentive to keep you alive so that they don't have to immediately pay the life insurance amount.
Reminds me a bit of Robin Hanson's "Buy Health, Not Health Care" proposal: http://hanson.gmu.edu/buyhealth.html
It is great that there is water at the moon's polls, but now there is no plan to return.
False. See my other comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1568358&cid=31331994
That would be very interesting indeed! I suppose that would require that it be patchy rather than uniformly distributed. Because it's certainly not taking up even a couple percent of the north pole image that they showed in a manner that's that thick and relatively pure; there's just too much area for that compared to their cited mass figure.
I was taking a look at this image which Paul Spudis posted, specifically the middle "CPR" image:
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/files/2010/03/Peary-CPR.jpg
I assume that the regions where it's >= 2 meters thick corresponds to the reddest regions, of which there are only a few speckles. It also makes sense when you consider that large amounts of lunar ice are likely to only persist in those parts of the crater which are in permanent shadow.
Also, as a practical matter, it's worth noting that these craters are some of the coldest spots in the solar system. It'll require some clever engineering to work in an environment with a temperature even colder than liquid nitrogen.
Can someone tell me why the ice doesn't just turn to gas and vent to space?
It's really, really cold in these craters -- they're actually some of the coldest spots in the solar system, at -400F (-240 degrees celsius or a little higher than 30 Kelvin). Ice can remain there for billions of years without sublimation. Heck, you could probably store liquid nitrogen in these craters.
As for the ice issue: 600m metric tons at the "north pole". They say it's within green circles that look to take up something like 4% of the image. The area covered is down to 80N. The moon's circumference is 6790 miles. I'm too lazy to do the exact math, but that means that the area covered here is something like 550,000 square miles. That means that the area taken up by the green circles is something like 22,000 square miles, so about 27,000 metric tons per square mile. Mini-SAR measures to a depth of "a few meters"; let's say 10 feet. That would work out to about 100 grams of water per cubic foot in those areas. A cubic foot of regolith has a mass of something like 75 kilograms, so that would be about 0.13% water. These are very rough calculations, of course.
This certainly requires more investigation, but Paul Spudis, the scientist in charge of the experiment, posted the following on his blog, indicating that the evidence supports there being relatively pure ice at least 2 meters thick:
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2010/03/01/ice-at-the-north-pole-of-the-moon/
Over forty small (2-15 km diameter) craters near the north pole of the Moon are found to contain this elevated CPR material. The total mount of ice present at the pole depends on how thick it is; to see this elevated CPR effect, the ice must have a thickness on the order of tens of wavelengths of the radar used. Our radar wavelength is 12.6 cm, therefore we think that the ice must be at least two meters thick and relatively pure. At such a thickness, more than 600 million metric tones of water ice are present in this area.