A suborbital flight is short, expensive, and not very interesting. A trip to Mir was a real experience, but suborbital flight? It's like a really good roller coaster, with a really expensive ticket.
Market studies would tend to disagree with you: there is considerble interest in suborbital spaceflight among people with the means to pay for the experience. Is there a flaw you see in these studies?
It's possible right now to charter the "Vomit Comet" KC-135, and experience zero G for a minute or so.. You even get to unstrap and move around. Very few people do this. Penn and Teller, the magicians, did once. That gives a sense of the size of the market.
NASA's "Vomit Comet" cannot be chartered by the public, although there is one company, Zero G Corporation, working to provide such flights in the US, similar to what's commercially available in Russia. They haven't started commercial service (although the home page of the site claims an early 2003 introduction date), but they have made progress on the business and regulatory fronts.
About the only use for this would be tourism. The military does its own research and the microgravity research can be better done on ISS, which is subsidized and already in place.
One of the interesting applications of suborbital RLVs is the testing and qualification of microgravity experiments designed to be flown on the ISS. The several minutes of microgravity that a suborbital RLV provides time to make sure an instrument works as planned in microgravity. It's much better to know that the experiment isn't working as you thought it would -- or that a loose bit of solder is floating around, shorting out electronics -- on the ground, and not after installing it on the station! There are also circumstances when an experiment only needs a few continuous minutes of microgravity: far more than what you can get today on aircraft like the Vomit Comet, but for which the station is overkill.
Launching from 100,000 feet and Mach 3 will help even more - there was a proposal to build the third B-70 to support this kind of mission. There are also a couple of advantages of a very high altitude launch - for a given altitude, the velocity will be lower than a ground launch (lower aerodynamic pressure) and the nozzle can be configured for vacuum. The latter allows for a good expansion ratio with moderate pressure - smaller pumps for liquids or thinner cases for solids.
DARPA is currently funding a project called RASCAL (Responsive Access, Small Cargo, Affordable Launch) that would use such a high-altitude, high-speed aircraft to launch small (on the order of 100 kg) spacecraft into LEO quickly and cheaply. Earlier this year they awarded a contract to a startup, Space Launch Corporation, to continue design work on RASCAL. First flight is tentatively scheduled for 2006.
It's not exactly what you desire, but XSS-10, a microsatellite launched as a secondary payload on a Delta 2 GPS satellite launch in January, took images of the Delta 2's upper stage in orbit.
The article claims that Viking "involved the first probe to orbit another planet", but this is incorrect. Mariner 9 went into orbit around Mars in November 1971, just days ahead of the USSR's Mars 2 and Mars 3 spacecraft. There was also Mars 5 in early 1974 and Venera 9 and Venera 10, two Soviet Venus orbiters, in late 1975.
Dish time can be hideously expensive, and keep in mind your average home pizza dish doesn't quite cut the mustard in communicating with a small transponder millions of miles away.
Not only is Deep Space Network time expensive, it is hard to come by. The DSN serves a number of NASA missions, requiring a lot of careful scheduling to make sure each mission gets the DSN time it needs (if not what it wants.) The situation will only get worse in the next few years, as even more missions, from Cassini to a pair of Mars rovers, compete for scarce DSN time.
The ion drive aboard the DS1 broke several records with its stellar (literally) tortiose-vs-hare performance. Does anyone know if this technology has any potential for being adapted to the ISS?
I don't think ion propulsion is being considered for ISS right now, although it is being used for stationkeeping thrusters on a number of satellites (the XIPS system was developed by the former Hughes Space & Communications, now Boeing Satellite Systems, for commercial communications satellites.) The European Space Agency's Artemis experimental communications satellite is also using ion propulsion to adjust its orbit, after its Ariane 5 launcher malfunctioned and placed it in the wrong orbit.
For what it's worth, SETI@home recorded an average of nearly 40 teraFLOPs/sec in the last 24 hours. Makes that supercomputer look positively pokey by comparison.:-) And it appears they're gearing up to handle even more data...
After reading the notice regarding the discontinuation of AppWatch, I clicked on the link for their "Linux Update" site... only to see a big banner ad by Verio imploring me to "harness the power of Windows 2000 web hosting". Yup, that's good targeted advertising there, ZD...
... the 1,200 Christamas Island inhabitants who will now need to put up with the noise and pollution generated by throwing large amounts of metal skywards.
I think it's unlikely that "large amounts of metal" will be thrown skyward through this proposed facility, for three reasons:
The funding provided by the Australian government is only A$100 million (about US$52 million), roughly one-eighth of the estimated cost of the spaceport (or launch facility, if you will.) APSC will have to raise the rest privately, or go back to the government, hat in hand.
The commercial launch market is in pretty bad shape right now: supply of available launch vehicles exceeds demand by about 30-40%, according to recent studies. This has pushed down launch prices somewhat, but not enough to spur additional demand. Investors will not look favorably on a proposal to spend hundreds of millions to simply add to the launch capacity glut.
Despite its favorable launch site, the Aurora launch vehicle will only be able to place about 2.1-2.3 tonnes into geosynchronous orbit. Given the growing size of communications satellites -- the largest part of the commercial space market -- this is awfully small: maybe just enough to launch a Boeing 601 (a popular, but somewhat older, model of communications satellites). The trend has been for larger communications satellites, and thus larger vehicles.
Put those factors together, and it looks like it will be very difficult for APSC to raise the money needed to build the spaceport, let alone win many launch contracts.
This is a similar situation to a launch pad based in (Venezuala? Forgot link...) where the introduction of the Space Industry was meant to make life so much better for the locals, but in reality they all want rid of it because it brought none of the expected benefits.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. The only involvement Venezuela has had in launch site development in recent years is when it tried to block a proposed launch site in neighboring Guyana that now-defunct Beal Aerospace planned to build, and that was primarily because the launch site was to be in disputed territory that Venezuela claimed as its own.
Most payloads, especially telecomm satellites, are under 7000 pounds. Unlike Beal's proposed vehicle, the Roton is reusable and manned. It takes off and lands on its tail, like God and Robert Heinlein intended:-). And not only can they deliver your payload to orbit but, unlike Beal, they can bring it back! Never throw away another satellite!
Beal and Rotary (as well as other RLV startups, like Kelly and Pioneer) serve complimentary markets. The 7,000-lb. maxmium payload of the Roton C-9 is for low-Earth orbit, not GEO. That makes Roton useful for LEO satellite constellations like Globalstar (and Iridium if it survives!) but not for the GEO communications satellites, which are growing larger to accomodate additional, more powerful transponders. The HS 702, a new GEO communications satellite developed by Hughes, has a launch mass of 5,200 kg! This is a market for the BA-2 as well as other existing and proposed expendable launch vehicles. (Although some large RLVs, like VentureStar and Space Access' proposed vehicle, could also service the GEO market.)
Small RLVs like the Roton might one day open the space tourism market, if they can get the price-per-kg (or price-per-pound:-) down dramatically. That's something the BA-2 will never do, although boosters like it might one day launch the structures in orbit that future space tourists could visit!
This is actually more important for its interplanetary implications.
A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission.
Actually, the BA-2 would be able to place only about 6,000 kg into geosynchronous orbit, on a par with existing "heavy-lift" boosters (like the Ariane 5) but far short of the requirements for a Mars Direct type of human mission to Mars.
However, if the BA-2 can provide launch services at a lower cost than existing boosters (without sacrificing reliability) it may be able to capture not only a significant fraction of the commercial GEO communications satellite market, but become a viable option for robotic solar system exploration missions, such as Mars sample return and outer solar system spacecraft.
Of course, Beal has to build the rocket and find a place to launch it first...
The reports that China will launch a human into space in the immediate future -- the February 5 date being quoted by some sources -- is almost certainly wrong. China has a fleet of 3-4 ships (Yuan Wang) that would serve as tracking and ground stations for such a flight. (China, unlike the US, lacks a worldwide network of permanent ground stations or communications satellites that would serve that purpose.) Those ships were deployed worldwide in advance of the November launch of Shenzhou, a prototype of a Chinese manned spacecraft. Those ships have since returned to port in China and have not been redeployed, according to various sources.
China will likely attempt a manned launch as soon as the second half of this year, but claims of a February 5 manned launch should be treated very skeptically.
The article is a little vague. Did this craft come down on water or dry land?
The "Shenzhou" spacecraft landed in the Inner Mongolia region of China, on land.
They mention parachutes and retro-rockets and resemblance to Apollo.
Actually, Shenzhou far more closely resembles the Russian Soyuz spacecraft than any American vehicle; close enough that many have wondered how much Russian assistance was provided to the Chinese.
Incidentally, Mark Wade's excellent Encyclopedia Astronautica has a great deal of additional information and images of Shenzhou; perhaps the most comprehensive online resource available.
So something like the Sojourner Rover died in a month (its minimal design goal was a week)
Actually the rover, deployed a day after Pathfinder's landing, was still operating when contact was lost with the lander three months after landing, so it far exceeded its one-week design life. (The lander was designed for a one-month mission, so it too lasted longer than planned.)
if this had been one of the older Cadillac-style overengineered no expense spared missions, it would still be chugging away and getting good science done, instead of having provided us with tantalising glimpses of stuff and then making us sit and twiddle our thumbs for two years.
Actually, if it has been one of those "overengineered no expense spared missions", it would have likely performed no science -- the mission would never have been approved, or would have been delayed and/or canceled because it would be far too expensive than what NASA can afford these days. Or else it would have flown, followed by nothing else for a decade or more, like Viking.
Congress showed in the 1980s that it had little appetite for expensive missions like Galileo and Cassini (anyone here remember missions like CRAF?), and little has changed since then. A "faster better cheaper" philosophy lets you do more missions for less, but as always, there are tradeoffs.
So when Jan of 2000 comes around, what are they going to make it do next?
Galileo's extended mission is scheduled to end at the end of this year. However, if the spacecraft is still healthy, and there is additional funding available (not a sure thing; NASA's space science programs lost about $60 million in the fiscal year 2000 budget), there has been discussion of extending the mission through 2000. This would permit an additional flyby of Io in early 2000, more flybys of Europa and Ganymede (two other large moons of Jupiter) as well as joint observations of the Jupiter system with Cassini, which will fly by Jupiter on 2000 Dec 30 en route to Saturn.
Chandra's first pictures appeared on the net about a week ago at NASA's news site
Actually, the first Chandra images (of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A and a distant quasar) were released to the public during a press conference August 26. Read the NASA press release from that day as well as a related article.
Artemis is not the only effort devoted to going to the Moon and making money, although their plan is arguably the boldest. Some other companies with lunar projects:
LunaCorp has been working for several years on developing rovers to traverse the lunar surface, which could be controlled on Earth (by paying customers, of course). Originally they were planning a long journey across the Moon, visiting several Apollo and other landing sites, but their focus is now on a mission to the lunar poles to look for water ice believed to exist there. (LunaCorp's server appears to be offline at the present time, unfortunately.)
Applied Space Resources (ASR) is working on a spacecraft mission to go to the Moon and return several kilograms of rock and soil samples to be sold on the open market. They believe they can accomplish their initial mission for a cost on the order of NASA's Lunar Prospector mission ($60-70 million).
TransOrbital, which seems at least loosely affiliated with Artemis, is planning a spacecraft mission to go into lunar orbit and return high-resolution images and video to be sold.
These and some other commercial lunar projects were discussed at the first Commercial Lunar Base Symposium in Houston in July. This article has some more details about the conference. Those in the Los Angeles area might want to check out the Space Frontier Conference, Sept. 23-26, where commercial lunar efforts will be one of the topics.
Unfortunately, not since JFK has the U.S. had a leader with the vision, the intelligence, the rhetorical ability, and the chutzpah to ram through a $1 trillion (in today's terms) manned moon project.
Keep in mind that American politicans were not necessarilty more visionary 40 years ago. They were more strongly motivated by the threat -- real or perceived -- posed by the Soviet Union, and were willing to spend vast sums of money (although far less than the $1 trillion claimed above) to demonstrate American technological superiority.
As such a set of circumstances is unlikely to arise again in the foreseeable future, commercial endeavors will have to play a larger role in the exploration and development of space in the future. Artemis may not be the most feasible way to acomplish this, but it is not the only way either.
Hasn't Artemis been around for absolutely AGES now? I have a feeling that I read about it in a forum somewhere on Slashdot....
Yes, Artemis has been around for a number of years, and I'm not aware of any recent developments that would make it especially newsworthy.
Having said that, when it started it did look rather 'Pie in the Sky', but these days they are looking in a much more credible position!
The Artemis folks have been working hard to refine their mission concept, but I don't know if it's that much more credible now than in the recent past.
The problem with this and other commercial space ventures is the difficulty raising capital. For example, look at the companies developing reusable launch vehicles. Their costs are much lower that Artemis' costs (up to an order of magnitude less) and they have a well-defined market (launching commuications and other spacecraft into Earth orbit.) Yet they have had considerable difficulty raising funds: Rotary Rocket needs "only" $150 million for its entire development process, including building its first flight vehicle, yet has raised only about $30 million.
(Admittedly, the uncertainly in the size of the market for satellite launches, exacerbated by the recent Chapter 11 filings by Iridium and ICO, have made it difficult to show investors that these are viable businesses. This only compounds the problems for Artemis, though.)
Given the current state of venture capital, Artemis might find the most success by billing itself as a unique.com e-commerce startup and watch the VCs stumble over themselves to give it money!:-)
No one. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prevents nations from making claims of soverignity on the Moon and other celestial bodies. Thus, those who claim to own part or all of the Moon are frauds: there is no government that recognizes their claims, no registrar of deeds with whom to file claims, and no court to arbitrate disputes.
(It should be noted that the U.S., and most other countries, rejected a far more restrictive treaty, the "Moon Treaty", in the late 1970s. This would have required any exploration and development of the Moon to serve "all mankind" and would have essentially made commercial development impossible. The treaty was not ratified by the U.S. Senate after a strong lobbying effort by the L-5 Society, a predecessor of the present-day National Space Society.)
That said, property rights in space is a thorny issue today, since many advocates of commercial development of space see the inability to claim recognized property rights on other bodies as a major hurdle. This will become a major issue down the road as commercial space efforts involving the Moon, asteroids, and other bodies ramp up.
A portion of Roddenberry's cremains (cremated remains) were first carried into orbit on a shuttle mission (forget which one) as part of the personal belongings of one of the crew. This was not revealed until well after the mission, by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry.
Later, a small sample of his cremains, along with those of a few dozen other people, were flown into orbit by Celestis, a private company. Timothy Leary was among the others on that "Founder's Flight", leading to unending headlines of the form "Leary's Final Trip.":-).
A 10% budget cut should not cause the loss of every space science program, period.
Nearly half of the cuts ($640 million of $1.3+ billion) are in NASA's space sciences programs, which account for only about $2 billion of its $13.6 billion budget before the cuts. With those kinds of cuts, a lot of missions will fall by the wayside, especially those missions still in the early planning stages (which can be cut with a minimum amount of money "wasted".) Anything planned for launch in the next couple of years, including the Mars 2001 missions, should be okay, but beyond that it looks grim.
It appears as if the article from SpaceViews was a little slanted.
Well, I don't write for AntiSpaceViews, you know.:-)
In reality do you really think all the programs will be cut that they say will be cut?
It's important to note that this is only the decision of a single subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The decision still requires full committee approval as well as a floor vote by the whole House, not to mention the Senate version as well (which, of course, will be different than the House version, requiring a conference committee to hammer out the differences...)
However, the forces at work here that led to the House subcommittee's severe cuts are also at play in the Senate, namely the 1997 Clinton-Congress agreement on spending caps to cut the deficit. The deficit has been cut, but the agreement is in effect and neither side wants to be the first to openly want to break it. So you end up with the subcommittee cutting funding in the one place it could: NASA, specifically its space science projects (as opposed to the more politically sensitive shuttle and station efforts.) It's a more politically-expedient move on the committee's part than cutting, say, veterans affairs.
It's possible that Congress will eventually break the caps and return money to NASA. Or, it may approve "emergency" funding that doesn't count towards the spending caps for NASA. (The House approved such emergency funds to conduct the 2000 Census... as if this suddenly came up and didn't take place every 10 years!:-) A final decision liekly won't be made until after the August recess.
The article from SpaceViews claims that we got so much surplus that we don't even know what to do with it!
No, that wasn't my intent, and I apologize if it could be misconstrued that way. The point was that additional spending cuts are being made in the name of deficit reduction, even though the deficit has become a surplus (depending on your accounting methods, a discussion I won't get into here.)
Slashdot Mirror
A suborbital flight is short, expensive, and not very interesting. A trip to Mir was a real experience, but suborbital flight? It's like a really good roller coaster, with a really expensive ticket.
Market studies would tend to disagree with you: there is considerble interest in suborbital spaceflight among people with the means to pay for the experience. Is there a flaw you see in these studies?
It's possible right now to charter the "Vomit Comet" KC-135, and experience zero G for a minute or so.. You even get to unstrap and move around. Very few people do this. Penn and Teller, the magicians, did once. That gives a sense of the size of the market.
NASA's "Vomit Comet" cannot be chartered by the public, although there is one company, Zero G Corporation, working to provide such flights in the US, similar to what's commercially available in Russia. They haven't started commercial service (although the home page of the site claims an early 2003 introduction date), but they have made progress on the business and regulatory fronts.
Jeff Foust
The Space Review
About the only use for this would be tourism. The military does its own research and the microgravity research can be better done on ISS, which is subsidized and already in place.
One of the interesting applications of suborbital RLVs is the testing and qualification of microgravity experiments designed to be flown on the ISS. The several minutes of microgravity that a suborbital RLV provides time to make sure an instrument works as planned in microgravity. It's much better to know that the experiment isn't working as you thought it would -- or that a loose bit of solder is floating around, shorting out electronics -- on the ground, and not after installing it on the station! There are also circumstances when an experiment only needs a few continuous minutes of microgravity: far more than what you can get today on aircraft like the Vomit Comet, but for which the station is overkill.
Jeff Foust
The Space Review
Launching from 100,000 feet and Mach 3 will help even more - there was a proposal to build the third B-70 to support this kind of mission. There are also a couple of advantages of a very high altitude launch - for a given altitude, the velocity will be lower than a ground launch (lower aerodynamic pressure) and the nozzle can be configured for vacuum. The latter allows for a good expansion ratio with moderate pressure - smaller pumps for liquids or thinner cases for solids.
DARPA is currently funding a project called RASCAL (Responsive Access, Small Cargo, Affordable Launch) that would use such a high-altitude, high-speed aircraft to launch small (on the order of 100 kg) spacecraft into LEO quickly and cheaply. Earlier this year they awarded a contract to a startup, Space Launch Corporation, to continue design work on RASCAL. First flight is tentatively scheduled for 2006.
Jeff Foust
The Space Review
It's not exactly what you desire, but XSS-10, a microsatellite launched as a secondary payload on a Delta 2 GPS satellite launch in January, took images of the Delta 2's upper stage in orbit.
I believe the reference must be to the first orbiter and lander (probe) in combination.
Mars 2 and Mars 3 were orbiter/lander combos. Not very successful ones, though...
The article claims that Viking "involved the first probe to orbit another planet", but this is incorrect. Mariner 9 went into orbit around Mars in November 1971, just days ahead of the USSR's Mars 2 and Mars 3 spacecraft. There was also Mars 5 in early 1974 and Venera 9 and Venera 10, two Soviet Venus orbiters, in late 1975.
Dish time can be hideously expensive, and keep in mind your average home pizza dish doesn't quite cut the mustard in communicating with a small transponder millions of miles away.
Not only is Deep Space Network time expensive, it is hard to come by. The DSN serves a number of NASA missions, requiring a lot of careful scheduling to make sure each mission gets the DSN time it needs (if not what it wants.) The situation will only get worse in the next few years, as even more missions, from Cassini to a pair of Mars rovers, compete for scarce DSN time.
The ion drive aboard the DS1 broke several records with its stellar (literally) tortiose-vs-hare performance. Does anyone know if this technology has any potential for being adapted to the ISS?
I don't think ion propulsion is being considered for ISS right now, although it is being used for stationkeeping thrusters on a number of satellites (the XIPS system was developed by the former Hughes Space & Communications, now Boeing Satellite Systems, for commercial communications satellites.) The European Space Agency's Artemis experimental communications satellite is also using ion propulsion to adjust its orbit, after its Ariane 5 launcher malfunctioned and placed it in the wrong orbit.
For what it's worth, SETI@home recorded an average of nearly 40 teraFLOPs/sec in the last 24 hours. Makes that supercomputer look positively pokey by comparison. :-) And it appears they're gearing up to handle even more data...
After reading the notice regarding the discontinuation of AppWatch, I clicked on the link for their "Linux Update" site... only to see a big banner ad by Verio imploring me to "harness the power of Windows 2000 web hosting". Yup, that's good targeted advertising there, ZD...
I think it's unlikely that "large amounts of metal" will be thrown skyward through this proposed facility, for three reasons:
Put those factors together, and it looks like it will be very difficult for APSC to raise the money needed to build the spaceport, let alone win many launch contracts.
This is a similar situation to a launch pad based in (Venezuala? Forgot link...) where the introduction of the Space Industry was meant to make life so much better for the locals, but in reality they all want rid of it because it brought none of the expected benefits.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. The only involvement Venezuela has had in launch site development in recent years is when it tried to block a proposed launch site in neighboring Guyana that now-defunct Beal Aerospace planned to build, and that was primarily because the launch site was to be in disputed territory that Venezuela claimed as its own.
Most payloads, especially telecomm satellites, are under 7000 pounds. Unlike Beal's proposed vehicle, the Roton is reusable and manned. It takes off and lands on its tail, like God and Robert Heinlein intended :-). And not only can they deliver your payload to orbit but, unlike Beal, they can bring it back! Never throw away another satellite!
Beal and Rotary (as well as other RLV startups, like Kelly and Pioneer) serve complimentary markets. The 7,000-lb. maxmium payload of the Roton C-9 is for low-Earth orbit, not GEO. That makes Roton useful for LEO satellite constellations like Globalstar (and Iridium if it survives!) but not for the GEO communications satellites, which are growing larger to accomodate additional, more powerful transponders. The HS 702, a new GEO communications satellite developed by Hughes, has a launch mass of 5,200 kg! This is a market for the BA-2 as well as other existing and proposed expendable launch vehicles. (Although some large RLVs, like VentureStar and Space Access' proposed vehicle, could also service the GEO market.)
Small RLVs like the Roton might one day open the space tourism market, if they can get the price-per-kg (or price-per-pound :-) down dramatically. That's something the BA-2 will never do, although boosters like it might one day launch the structures in orbit that future space tourists could visit!
This is actually more important for its interplanetary implications.
A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission.
Actually, the BA-2 would be able to place only about 6,000 kg into geosynchronous orbit, on a par with existing "heavy-lift" boosters (like the Ariane 5) but far short of the requirements for a Mars Direct type of human mission to Mars.
However, if the BA-2 can provide launch services at a lower cost than existing boosters (without sacrificing reliability) it may be able to capture not only a significant fraction of the commercial GEO communications satellite market, but become a viable option for robotic solar system exploration missions, such as Mars sample return and outer solar system spacecraft.
Of course, Beal has to build the rocket and find a place to launch it first...
The reports that China will launch a human into space in the immediate future -- the February 5 date being quoted by some sources -- is almost certainly wrong. China has a fleet of 3-4 ships (Yuan Wang) that would serve as tracking and ground stations for such a flight. (China, unlike the US, lacks a worldwide network of permanent ground stations or communications satellites that would serve that purpose.) Those ships were deployed worldwide in advance of the November launch of Shenzhou, a prototype of a Chinese manned spacecraft. Those ships have since returned to port in China and have not been redeployed, according to various sources.
China will likely attempt a manned launch as soon as the second half of this year, but claims of a February 5 manned launch should be treated very skeptically.
Jeff Foust
jeff@spaceviews.com
The article is a little vague. Did this craft come down on water or dry land?
The "Shenzhou" spacecraft landed in the Inner Mongolia region of China, on land.
They mention parachutes and retro-rockets and resemblance to Apollo.
Actually, Shenzhou far more closely resembles the Russian Soyuz spacecraft than any American vehicle; close enough that many have wondered how much Russian assistance was provided to the Chinese.
Incidentally, Mark Wade's excellent Encyclopedia Astronautica has a great deal of additional information and images of Shenzhou; perhaps the most comprehensive online resource available.
- Jeff
So something like the Sojourner Rover died in a month (its minimal design goal was a week)
Actually the rover, deployed a day after Pathfinder's landing, was still operating when contact was lost with the lander three months after landing, so it far exceeded its one-week design life. (The lander was designed for a one-month mission, so it too lasted longer than planned.)
if this had been one of the older Cadillac-style overengineered no expense spared missions, it would still be chugging away and getting good science done, instead of having provided us with tantalising glimpses of stuff and then making us sit and twiddle our thumbs for two years.
Actually, if it has been one of those "overengineered no expense spared missions", it would have likely performed no science -- the mission would never have been approved, or would have been delayed and/or canceled because it would be far too expensive than what NASA can afford these days. Or else it would have flown, followed by nothing else for a decade or more, like Viking.
Congress showed in the 1980s that it had little appetite for expensive missions like Galileo and Cassini (anyone here remember missions like CRAF?), and little has changed since then. A "faster better cheaper" philosophy lets you do more missions for less, but as always, there are tradeoffs.
Galileo's extended mission is scheduled to end at the end of this year. However, if the spacecraft is still healthy, and there is additional funding available (not a sure thing; NASA's space science programs lost about $60 million in the fiscal year 2000 budget), there has been discussion of extending the mission through 2000. This would permit an additional flyby of Io in early 2000, more flybys of Europa and Ganymede (two other large moons of Jupiter) as well as joint observations of the Jupiter system with Cassini, which will fly by Jupiter on 2000 Dec 30 en route to Saturn.
Chandra's first pictures appeared on the net about a week ago at NASA's news site
Actually, the first Chandra images (of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A and a distant quasar) were released to the public during a press conference August 26. Read the NASA press release from that day as well as a related article.
Artemis is not the only effort devoted to going to the Moon and making money, although their plan is arguably the boldest. Some other companies with lunar projects:
These and some other commercial lunar projects were discussed at the first Commercial Lunar Base Symposium in Houston in July. This article has some more details about the conference. Those in the Los Angeles area might want to check out the Space Frontier Conference, Sept. 23-26, where commercial lunar efforts will be one of the topics.
Unfortunately, not since JFK has the U.S. had a leader with the vision, the intelligence, the rhetorical ability, and the chutzpah to ram through a $1 trillion (in today's terms) manned moon project.
Keep in mind that American politicans were not necessarilty more visionary 40 years ago. They were more strongly motivated by the threat -- real or perceived -- posed by the Soviet Union, and were willing to spend vast sums of money (although far less than the $1 trillion claimed above) to demonstrate American technological superiority.
As such a set of circumstances is unlikely to arise again in the foreseeable future, commercial endeavors will have to play a larger role in the exploration and development of space in the future. Artemis may not be the most feasible way to acomplish this, but it is not the only way either.
Hasn't Artemis been around for absolutely AGES now? I have a feeling that I read about it in a forum somewhere on Slashdot....
Yes, Artemis has been around for a number of years, and I'm not aware of any recent developments that would make it especially newsworthy.
Having said that, when it started it did look rather 'Pie in the Sky', but these days they are looking in a much more credible position!
The Artemis folks have been working hard to refine their mission concept, but I don't know if it's that much more credible now than in the recent past.
The problem with this and other commercial space ventures is the difficulty raising capital. For example, look at the companies developing reusable launch vehicles. Their costs are much lower that Artemis' costs (up to an order of magnitude less) and they have a well-defined market (launching commuications and other spacecraft into Earth orbit.) Yet they have had considerable difficulty raising funds: Rotary Rocket needs "only" $150 million for its entire development process, including building its first flight vehicle, yet has raised only about $30 million.
(Admittedly, the uncertainly in the size of the market for satellite launches, exacerbated by the recent Chapter 11 filings by Iridium and ICO, have made it difficult to show investors that these are viable businesses. This only compounds the problems for Artemis, though.)
Given the current state of venture capital, Artemis might find the most success by billing itself as a unique .com e-commerce startup and watch the VCs stumble over themselves to give it money! :-)
In all seriousness, who owns the moon?
No one. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prevents nations from making claims of soverignity on the Moon and other celestial bodies. Thus, those who claim to own part or all of the Moon are frauds: there is no government that recognizes their claims, no registrar of deeds with whom to file claims, and no court to arbitrate disputes.
(It should be noted that the U.S., and most other countries, rejected a far more restrictive treaty, the "Moon Treaty", in the late 1970s. This would have required any exploration and development of the Moon to serve "all mankind" and would have essentially made commercial development impossible. The treaty was not ratified by the U.S. Senate after a strong lobbying effort by the L-5 Society, a predecessor of the present-day National Space Society.)
That said, property rights in space is a thorny issue today, since many advocates of commercial development of space see the inability to claim recognized property rights on other bodies as a major hurdle. This will become a major issue down the road as commercial space efforts involving the Moon, asteroids, and other bodies ramp up.
A portion of Roddenberry's cremains (cremated remains) were first carried into orbit on a shuttle mission (forget which one) as part of the personal belongings of one of the crew. This was not revealed until well after the mission, by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry.
Later, a small sample of his cremains, along with those of a few dozen other people, were flown into orbit by Celestis, a private company. Timothy Leary was among the others on that "Founder's Flight", leading to unending headlines of the form "Leary's Final Trip." :-).
A 10% budget cut should not cause the loss of every space science program, period.
Nearly half of the cuts ($640 million of $1.3+ billion) are in NASA's space sciences programs, which account for only about $2 billion of its $13.6 billion budget before the cuts. With those kinds of cuts, a lot of missions will fall by the wayside, especially those missions still in the early planning stages (which can be cut with a minimum amount of money "wasted".) Anything planned for launch in the next couple of years, including the Mars 2001 missions, should be okay, but beyond that it looks grim.
Jeff Foust
jeff@spaceviews.com
It appears as if the article from SpaceViews was a little slanted.
Well, I don't write for AntiSpaceViews, you know. :-)
In reality do you really think all the programs will be cut that they say will be cut?
It's important to note that this is only the decision of a single subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The decision still requires full committee approval as well as a floor vote by the whole House, not to mention the Senate version as well (which, of course, will be different than the House version, requiring a conference committee to hammer out the differences...)
However, the forces at work here that led to the House subcommittee's severe cuts are also at play in the Senate, namely the 1997 Clinton-Congress agreement on spending caps to cut the deficit. The deficit has been cut, but the agreement is in effect and neither side wants to be the first to openly want to break it. So you end up with the subcommittee cutting funding in the one place it could: NASA, specifically its space science projects (as opposed to the more politically sensitive shuttle and station efforts.) It's a more politically-expedient move on the committee's part than cutting, say, veterans affairs.
It's possible that Congress will eventually break the caps and return money to NASA. Or, it may approve "emergency" funding that doesn't count towards the spending caps for NASA. (The House approved such emergency funds to conduct the 2000 Census... as if this suddenly came up and didn't take place every 10 years! :-) A final decision liekly won't be made until after the August recess.
The article from SpaceViews claims that we got so much surplus that we don't even know what to do with it!
No, that wasn't my intent, and I apologize if it could be misconstrued that way. The point was that additional spending cuts are being made in the name of deficit reduction, even though the deficit has become a surplus (depending on your accounting methods, a discussion I won't get into here.)
Jeff Foust
jeff@spaceviews.com