Quotulatiousness

July 24, 2011

Farewell Space Shuttle . . . you massive boondoggle

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

I’ve been ambivalent about the space shuttle program for decades — not because I’m anti-space, but because I think the shuttle was government methadone to replace a real space program. At that, I hadn’t connected all the dots the way Scott Locklin has here:

The Space Shuttle, an object lesson in the Sunk Cost Fallacy, has been with us since my early youth. This preposterous boondoggle was originally supposed to make manned space flight cheaper: to the point where getting a pound of matter into space would be as cheap as sending it to Australia. That was the only purpose for building the damn thing in the first place. The idea was, if your spaceship was reusable, it would be cheaper to send people and heavy things into space. If using the same thing multiple times isn’t cheaper, well, what’s the point? Conspicuous consumption, perhaps?

In one of its original incarnations, the Shuttle was supposed to launch like an ordinary aircraft. A jet + rocket powered “first stage” heavy lifter would propel the craft into the upper atmosphere, and the rocket propelled second stage would send the thing into space. Seems like a good idea to me. Jets are pretty easy to fly and maintain cheaply. Jets also don’t have to carry vast quantities of oxidizer. Plus; you get to reuse the whole mess.

Unfortunately, the politicians decided that building the first stage heavy lifter would cost “too much.” Instead they changed the design, and strapped a couple of solid rockets to a beefed up “orbiter” and giant non-reusable fuel tank. That wasn’t the worst of it: those pieces should have still in principle provided for a cheap launch vehicle. In practice, the silica tiles and engines turned out to have very high maintenance costs involving substantial labor, and turn around times were 1/6 of what they should have been, making the thing 6 (though more like 10) times as expensive as it was designed to be.

The goal of the space shuttle program was to have safe, re-usable spacecraft that could lift heavy loads to low earth orbit at a cost of about $50 per pound. What they ended up with was a dangerous fleet of hangar queens that took loads to orbit at an estimated cost of $50,000 per pound. That’s quite a missed set of goals.

June 20, 2011

SpaceX and the rogue consultant

Filed under: Law, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:48

SpaceX is going to court over a would-be consultant’s claims that their rockets are unsafe:

According to SpaceX’s filing with the Fairfax County circuit court in Virginia, Joseph Fragola, veep at tech consulting firm Valador, tried to obtain a hefty deal from SpaceX at the beginning of June:

     Fragola attempted to obtain a consulting contract from SpaceX worth as much as $1 million. He claimed that SpaceX needed an “independent” analysis of its rocket to bolster its reputation with NASA based on what he called an unfair “perception” about SpaceX. SpaceX did not respond favorably to Fragola’s offer.

The rocket company — which as everyone knows is helmed, CTO’d and in part bankrolled by famous nerdwealth kingpin Elon Musk — says it then found out that Fragola had subsequently done his level best to create such a perception:

     SpaceX subsequently leamed that Fragola has been contacting officials in the United States Government to make disparaging remarks about SpaceX, which have created the very “perception” that he claimed SpaceX needed his help to rectify.

     For instance, in an email he wrote on June 8, 2011, to Bryan O’Connor, a NASA official at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, Fragola falsely stated: “I have just heard a rumor, and I am trying now to check its veracity, that the Falcon 9 experienced a double engine failure in the first stage and that the entire stage blew up just after the first stage separated. I also heard that this information was being held from NASA until SpaceX can ‘verify’ it.”

SpaceX for its part says that this rumour is “blatantly false… as a purported ‘expert’ in the industry, he should have known that the statements were false.”

May 30, 2011

NASA’s changing goals for Orion

Filed under: Politics, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

The ever-sarcastic Lewis Page looks at how NASA has been trying to reposition their planned Orion spaceship:

NASA has declared that its pork-tastic Orion moonship — whose primary mission disappeared with President Obama’s decision that there will be no manned US return to the Moon — is now to be a “deep space transportation system”, suggesting that the agency plans to send it on missions beyond Earth orbit.

It remains unclear how the newly-renamed Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) will travel into space, when it will do so and what its destination might be — though a near-Earth asteroid is a likely possibility. A major reason for Orion’s continued survival appears to be ignoble porkbarrel politics — but there is a tantalising possibility that it might fly beyond Earth orbit in the relatively near future.

What Page calls NASA’s “pork map” shows why the MPCV has strong, bi-partisan political support regardless of its actual utility for the space program:

Regardless of the political support, however, the most likely view of US federal government finances indicates that Orion/MPCV won’t be viable in the proposed timeframe. There’s a non-governmental choice, however:

Famous geekbiz-kingpin Elon Musk and his upstart rocket company SpaceX have come from nowhere in just eight years to successfully test-fly their brand new and very cheap Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, already apparently quite capable of performing the ISS supply mission. Only a few years ago, many in NASA and the established industry were arguing that this would never happen.

It’s also no secret that Musk and SpaceX are working on a new Merlin 2 rocket engine, much bigger than the current Merlin 1 which propels the Falcon 9. A multicore heavy lifter based on Merlin 2 would be in the 100-tonne-plus realm required to mount a Mars mission, and will surely be the cheapest offering competing at the 2015 heavy lift Mars-rocket decision.

May 24, 2011

Britain’s entry in the new race to space

Filed under: Britain, Space, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Jonathan Amos reports on the UK Space Agency (UKSA) long-simmered design/proposal called Skylon:

Skylon has been in development in the UK in various guises for nearly 30 years.

It is an evolution of an idea first pursued by British Aerospace and Rolls Royce in the 1980s.

That concept, known as Hotol, did have technical weaknesses that eventually led the aerospace companies to end their involvement.

But the engineers behind the project continued to refine their thinking and they are now working independently on a much-updated vehicle in a company called Reaction Engines Limited (REL).

Realising the Sabre propulsion system is essential to the success of the project.

The engine would burn hydrogen and oxygen to provide thrust — but in the lower atmosphere this oxygen would be taken directly from the air.

This means the 84m-long spaceplane can fly lighter from the outset with a higher thrust-to-weight ratio, enabling it to make a single leap to orbit, rather than using and dumping propellant stages on the ascent — as is the case with current expendable rockets.

Update: Lewis Page has more on the Skylon project.

April 28, 2011

Learning from mistakes, Martian style

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

I have to admit it’s doubly amusing finding articles like Mars ate my spacecraft!, once for the content and once for the amusing title:

The investigation board made the not-terribly-earth-shaking observation that tired people make mistakes. The contractor used excessive overtime to meet an ambitious schedule. Mars is tough on schedules. Slip by just one day past the end of the launch window and the mission must idle for two years. In some businesses we can dicker with the boss over the due date, but you just can’t negotiate with planetary geometries.

[. . .]

NASA’s mantra is to test like you fly, fly what you tested. Yet no impact test of a running, powered, DS2 system ever occurred. Though planned, these were deleted midway through the project due to schedule considerations. Two possible reasons were found for Deep Space 2’s twin flops: electronics failure in the high-g impact, and ionization around the antenna after the impacts. Strangely, the antenna was never tested in a simulation of Mar’s 6 torr atmosphere.

While the DS2 probes were slamming into the Red Planet things weren’t going much better on MPL. The investigation board believes the landing legs deployed when the spacecraft was 1,500 meters high, as designed. Three sensors, one per leg, signal a successful touchdown, causing the code to turn the descent engine off. Engineers knew that when the legs deployed these sensors could experience a transient, giving a false “down” reading… but somehow forgot to inform the firmware people. The glitch was latched; at 40 meters altitude the code started looking at the data, saw the false readings, and faithfully switched off the engine.

A pre-launch system test failed to detect the problem because the sensors were miswired. After correcting the wiring error the test was never repeated.

H/T to Paula Lieberman for the link.

April 22, 2011

Houston loses space shuttle sweepstakes

Filed under: History, Space, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:26

Houston has a problem with the allocation of the soon-to-be retired space shuttles:

Which city, in the whole of the United States, would the average person associate most clearly with America’s towering achievements, and no few sorrows, over the past half century of sending men and women into space? Why, Houston, of course — home of the Johnson Space Centre, where NASA’s mission control is located. We know this from all that has been said and done in the past. The first words Neil Armstrong uttered as Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon in 1969 were: “Houston, Tranquility base here — the Eagle has landed.”

The name of Houston will forever be associated with the manned exploration of space. No astronaut ever radioed laconically back from a crippled spaceship, “Manhattan, we have a problem”. Yet, in NASA’s recent selection of the final destinations for its four extant space shuttles, now that the last operational ones are about to be pensioned off, New York City will get Enterprise, the first of the shuttles that was rolled out in 1976, while Houston gets snubbed.

A score or more of museums and other institutions around the country competed for the honour of having a shuttle in their permanent collection. Apart from offering an appealing display, each had to be ready to stump up $28.8m to cover the cost of preparing and transporting the winged spacecraft to its new location. Of the three other remaining shuttles, Discovery is destined for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum annexe outside Washington, DC. After the launch in late June of the 135th (and last) mission in the shuttle programme, Atlantis will remain in Florida to be exhibited at the Kennedy Space Centre’s visitor centre.

Meanwhile, after its own final mission later this month, Endeavour, the youngest of the shuttles, will be ferried to Los Angeles to end its days in the California Science Centre, alongside existing exhibits of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, and close to the old Rockwell plant in Palmdale where the shuttle was developed. Meanwhile, just up the road, at Edwards Air Force Base, is the runway where nearly half of all shuttle flights touched down.

April 21, 2011

Elon’s Dragon may “land on Mars”

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:35

While you’re talking up your own private space venture, you can probably be excused for a bit of boasting:

Famous upstart startup rocket company SpaceX, bankrolled and helmed by renowned internet nerdwealth hecamillionaire Elon Musk, has once again sent its goalposts racing ahead of its rapidly-advancing corporate reality.

The plucky challenger has stated that its “Dragon” capsule is not merely capable of delivering supplies to the International Space Station: it is — potentially — also capable of carrying astronauts to the space station and back down to Earth again.

In a statement released yesterday, Musk and SpaceX also make the bold claim that the Dragon, once fitted with modifications that the company is now developing under NASA contract, would also be able to land “almost anywhere on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy, overcoming the limitation of a winged architecture that works only in Earth’s atmosphere” (our emphasis).

April 8, 2011

The economics of Falcon Heavy

Filed under: Economics, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Charles Stross runs the numbers on the new SpaceX Falcon Heavy:

SpaceX announce Falcon Heavy. It’s been expected for some time — it’s been on their road map for a few years — but it’s worth repeating: man-rated and with a payload of 53 tons to Low Earth Orbit, Falcon Heavy has the largest payload of any space launcher since Energiya and the Saturn V, and it’s dirty-cheap by EELV standards at $80M-120M per launch. Moreover, it can’t easily be dismissed as vapourware because it’s an evolutionary development of a real, flying launch vehicle (Falcon 9) — a Falcon 9 core with two extra first stages strapped to the sides as boosters (and some fancy cross-stage plumbing to run the central core motors off fuel bled from the strap-ons, so that at BECO the central stage still carries a full fuel load). With the giant Iridium NEXT contract SpaceX have landed (the largest commercial launch contract in history), not to mention the ISS resupply contract, SpaceX looks likely to have the cash flow to build and fly this thing.

[. . .]

Note that these days the budget for a big Hollywood blockbuster — Avatar, for instance — can push over the $0.3Bn mark. It’s hard to say what the media rights to the second! ever! manned Moon program! would be, but it’s hard to see them going for much less than a major blockbuster movie. I think it unlikely that the expedition could be run entirely on the media rights, but they should certainly make a double-digit percentage contribution to the budget. Add the opportunity to tout for the science budget of some major agencies (by carrying lunar orbiter packages as payload, perhaps?) and it might be possible to raise $250-500M towards the costs of a $600-1000M expedition.

Is Elon Musk planning on being the 13th man on the moon?

More on Falcon Heavy at The Register.

March 4, 2011

“Secret space warplane” to launch on secret mission with secret payload

Filed under: Military, Space, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:10

Anything that gets Iran’s leadership all worked up into a panic can’t be all bad:

The US Air Force is set to launch its second X-37B miniature unmanned spaceplane — the type famously dubbed a “secret space warplane” by the Iranian government — on Friday.

[. . .]

Once in orbit the X-37B deploys a solar panel array, unlike its bigger cousin the Space Shuttle which uses fuel cells for electrical power. Thus the little robot spaceplane can remain in orbit for much longer periods unsupported before re-entering the atmosphere to make a runway landing. The previous OTV-1 mission, carrying a payload which remains secret, lasted 224 days and ended with a successful landing at the Vandenberg military space base in California.

As yet the USAF has not revealed the planned duration of the OTV-2 mission launching tomorrow, and again details of the payload are not being revealed.

There has been extensive speculation among space watchers regarding just why the USA needs a small robotic spaceplane. For most purposes a more normal spacecraft, unburdened by heat shields for re-entry, would be more economical. Even supposing a need to return to Earth, there would seem to be no need for the X-37B’s Shuttle-style delta wings, which add weight unnecessarily — a capsule design could be used, or a lifting body if runway landing was regarded as essential.

February 7, 2011

James May’s U-2 ride

Filed under: Media, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Not at all Top Gear-ish.

H/T to Jon for the link.

January 12, 2011

Fancy a bit of online skywatching?

Filed under: Science, Space — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:08

Here’s the home page of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

December 9, 2010

A step closer to private space travel

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule was successfully launched into orbit:

Judging by the excited faces of SpaceX employees after the live webcast, everything went perfectly. Dragon, the world’s first orbital space capsule built by the private sector, will now orbit the planet a few times over the next couple of hours before splashing down in the Pacific.

It is a small but significant milestone. The unmanned demonstration mission wants to prove that Dragon is able to deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). The reason for all the excitement is that the working capsule really points the world firmly in the direction of greater involvement by the private sector in providing trips to space. More competition means lower prices. Lower prices mean better access. After the retirement of the shuttle, Dragon would be able to deliver crew and cargo to the ISS on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.

Here’s hoping that NASA won’t succeed in choking off/crowding out other private launch efforts.

More information (including some graphics) at the BBC website.

October 8, 2010

Do you recognize this astronaut?

Filed under: Law, Media, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Apparently, he’s so easily identified in this image that he’s suing the artist, her recording company, and the stock image firm:

An American astronaut is suing Dido, claiming the singer misappropriated his image on her most recent album. Bruce McCandless II was photographed on a spacewalk in 1984; a quarter of a century later, he found himself floating in the centre of Dido’s Safe Trip Home album cover. And he isn’t happy.

McCandless’s complaint, filed last week, names Sony Music, Getty Images and Dido as defendants, using the singer’s full name – Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong. However, because the Nasa astronaut does not own the rights to the photograph, he is not suing for copyright infringement. Instead, he claims his “persona” was used without permission to help sell Dido’s album.

I don’t know what his chances of success might be, but if Sony Music bought the image from Getty, then it’s Getty that should be the only defendant . . . it’s the stock photography company’s responsibility to ensure that all the images they sell are properly licensed and available to sell on. Downstream users shouldn’t be held responsible for the due diligence of the seller.

August 31, 2010

Do we live in a “basement” universe?

Filed under: Science, Space — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:52

Many years back, one of the mailing lists I regularly read had a long and interesting discussion about the possibilities of creating new universes. Not in a science-fictional sense, but based on the theories then current and using the technologies which were already under development at the time. They were referred to as “basement universes”, “pocket universes” and so on. It was fascinating, although my weak math abilities forced me to skip over the parts of the discussion with all the numbers and symbols.

Elizabeth sent me a link to John Gribbin’s “Are we living in a designer universe?”, which took me back to those fascinating discussions:

The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and sceptics, one possibility has been almost ignored — the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.

As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.

However, to create a new universe would require a machine only slightly more powerful than the LHC — and there is every chance that our own universe may have been manufactured in this way.

August 23, 2010

QotD: Peak Culture

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:47

The height of their society peaked in 1969. They used militarism and socialism to put two guys on the Moon, they trotted out their public-private partnership (Concorde) to build exclusive supersonic transport for the rich. Max Faget and some other brilliant engineers designed a space shuttle fleet of ten vehicles capable of hundreds of flights a year to make access to low Earth orbit cheap and routine. And the Advanced Research Projects Agency had some geeks create an inter-networking protocol that could survive a nuclear war.

Obviously, they shot their wad, as it were, and no longer put guys on the Moon. They no longer fly supersonic transports. Their space shuttle is going to stop flying soon, if it hasn’t already. Those geeky guys went on to develop open source cryptography, open source software, and totally private economic transactions. The future we’re creating is going to be very, dramatically different. It is going to be decentralised to a fare thee well.

Right now, today, two people anywhere in the world *can* have a totally private economic exchange that cannot be detected by anyone else. And since it cannot be detected, it cannot be regulated, it cannot be prohibited, and it cannot be taxed. Even inflation cannot tax it, if the exchange is denominated in some money like silver or gold. Which means that those who dream of ruling the world sowed the seeds of their own damnation?

Jim Davidson, “Peak Culture”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-08-22

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