Space

Lest you doubt that President Obama can perform miracles, consider this: today he proposed eliminating human spaceflight from NASA's budget and the space activist community did not erupt in outrage; in fact, overall, they seem to like it! Likewise, I definitely support it. Here's why.

Bush's Vision for Space Exploration AKA "Apollo On Steroids" had problems. Principally, it failed to articulate why we should return to the Moon. It's a dead end. Robert Zubrin (founder of The Mars Society) has said, "the Moon will be an interplanetary pay toilet but they'll pay you to make a deposit." He meant that literally, in that the Moon is so poor in organic resources that human excrement would be worth more than gold to any future lunar colonists. Dennis Wingo, writing on The Space Review, cogently points out that we need to justify space exploration in terms of economic benefits that the public can understand. The Moon, in my personal opinion, does not provide that. It's a new Antarctica, a great place for certain types of research such as radio astronomy (on the Farside), but little else for the foreseeable future. It actually costs more, in terms of fuel, to stop at the Moon on the way to destinations beyond.

Those other destinations are where the action should be, and the Obama NASA budget proposal explicitly focuses exploration here. It won't be human exploration, at least in this budget. But by pointing NASA's Exploration division (as opposed to the Science division) in that direction, it lays a foundation for a better human spaceflight program: one that won't be repeating the glories of the past but reaching for new challenges beyond. This 'flexible path' provides a diverse multitude of destinations which have demonstrable economic benefits. First, the Sun-Earth Lagrange points, gravitational islands in space where we already have operating astronomical research satellites and more, including the next-generation Hubble, will be stationed. Repair missions to these could protect our investments in this fundamental research. Next, the Near Earth Asteroids. Sooner or later, we'll need the ability to 'nudge' a potential Earth-impacting asteroid out of the way. These asteroids also contain immense mineral resources and it's not too far-fetched to think that innovative techniques could make some of those resources available to industry here on Earth. Further out, the tiny moons of Mars, asteroids themselves, do provide an economically sensible staging area for missions down to the red planet. And Mars is the ultimate destination, the most Earth-like of planets, the one most rich in resources that humans can use to live.

By proposing robotic precursor missions to these places, the Obama administration is laying out the the boldest vision for NASA since Kennedy's, and one that can pay-off in benefits beyond the "flags and footprints" of national prestige.

These rationales have been advocated by The Planetary Society, by the Augustine panel (an independent task force commissioned by Obama; they recommended a number of alternatives too), by space mission designer Robert Farquhar, and probably many others. It's a credit to the president that he's making decisions that would provide more value for the NASA buck (actually, for every dollar of taxpayer money spent on NASA, about 167 dollars are spent on other things). Congress will fight back--NASA's human spaceflight infrastructure provides for tens of thousands of jobs, particularly in the Gulf Coast states.

Congress may win. Who knows, we may end up with a NASA budget that funds the Constellation architecture (the Ares I and V rockets, the Orion capsule, etc). As an aside, one of the problems with the Constellation plan, in contrast with Apollo, is that it would require two successful coordinated launches, one for cargo and one for crew, for any trips to the Moon or beyond. Instead, Obama calls for a new heavy-lift vehicle.

He also calls for making use of the International Space Station for ten more years, until 2020. The ISS, begun over a decade ago, has only just recently been completed to the point where it can host a crew of six, as originally planned. A few more shuttle missions are scheduled to fully complete it. Since it took twelve years to build, it makes sense to make what good use we can out of it.

Additionally, Obama calls for NASA's budget to be increased incrementally, by about $1 billion a year to support increased R+D and Earth & space science missions. This is exactly what NASA needs to be doing as a core mission: developing technologies that can be turned over to private enterprise, as well as continuing to do space science that lacks a profit motive, but enriches our experience and inspires learning.

Finally, Obama proposes that deliveries to the ISS be outsourced to private enterprise, as the Shuttle is still slated to be retired in a year. There are few companies that could deliver in that timescale, but still, you have to start somewhere. This could be the kick-off of competition that finally begins to reduce launch costs which, ultimately, are the biggest obstacle in the way of further space development.

Spaceflight Now has a good article on what it takes to lug a space shuttle across the country. For a craft that can fly into space strapped to the side of a rocket and glide to a landing back on Earth, just getting it from California to Florida is a huge deal.

They have to avoid weather: "30 seconds of rain... cost several million dollars", fly at a low altitude, consume enormous amounts of fuel, and make a number of pit stops along the way. I was hoping that Tucson's Davis-Monthan AFB would be on the route this time, but they don't post the schedule in advance any more due to security issues. Oh, but anyone can track each leg in real-time on the Net!

One of the few good legacies of the W administration may be the refocusing of NASA's human spaceflight program on exploration--leaving Earth orbit and establishing ourselves beyond this planet. I say 'may' because, for a variety of reasons, it has yet to happen.

First we need to use our shuttle fleet for finishing the International Space Station, repairing and upgrading Hubble, and launching the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Secondly, we need to complete a new launch architecture that can fulfill the mandates of Bush's Vision for Space Exploration (VSE). NASA's is developing the Orion spacecraft and Ares launch vehicles for this purpose, though they must wait until the shuttles retire in order to pay for them. Then, finally, we need to embark on missions that will sustain the program and catalyze further exploration.

It's that last part--the actual missions--that is tricky. The VSE puts forth the Moon as the prime destination and only after, Mars (it's mentioned as a brief afterthought). I was disappointed that Carolyn Porco in Wired's 2008 Smart List (15 people the next president should listen to), basically endorsed the VSE as-is. The person the next president should listen to on space policy is instead Robert Farquhar. In a recent issue of The Planetary Report (XXVIII.2) he detailed an alternative to the as-is VSE that has substantial advantages.

Basically, Farquhar's plan is a stepping-stone approach that builds infrastructure for expanding outward. The first destination is a spot in space beyond the Moon that is gravitationally balanced (the Sun-Earth L2, or second Langrangian, point). This point is the planned location for the next-generation space telescope, the JWST. Other telescopes are currently planned for this destination, so there is some incentive to have the capability to send astronauts there.

He envisions a "Deep Space Shuttle" that would ferry astronauts and equipment between Earth and L2, and an "Interplanetary Transfer Vehicle" that would swing by L2 and out to Near-Earth asteroids or Mars. The DSS, despite the name, has no hardware in common with our current Space Shuttles; it is a pure spacecraft, a re-usable "taxi" that doesn't need to fly through an atmosphere. It does month-long circuits; presumably, the space station could be the staging point for outbound astronauts.

The best part is that L2 can be used as a hub for destinations in the inner solar system. The cost and energy savings versus going down to the Moon and back are considerable. The ITV could use gravity-assisted flybys of the Moon for further savings on its circuits in to, or out of, L2.

This plan has a lot going for it. There are real economic incentives such as the ability to service telescopes and determining the feasibility of asteroid mining. Telescopes have also been talked about for the Moon; large, expensive projects utilizing the far side. It's also possible that one day, lunar soil could be a source of fuel; namely, tritium for fusion reactors. Needless to say, that is still in the realm of science fiction. This Near-Earth plan by contrast has smaller, simpler, more achievable goals, each of which builds upon the previous. This staging infrastructure could also be used to intercept asteroids on Earth-crossing trajectories, steering them away from potential impacts.

Another feature I like is that the plan lends itself naturally to international cooperation. The International Space Station has shown that such cooperation is not only possible, but that such large projects likely would not happen otherwise. It is extremely doubtful that we would have the political (not to mention financial) will to complete the ISS on our own. In the Farquhar plan for instance, the Europeans could build the ITV just like they recently completed the Jules Verne ATV, while we could collaborate with the Russians on the DSS.

And, ultimately, it is a more workable path to Mars. The Moon may become an Antarctic-style outpost, but Mars can provide humanity's second world. There is a fork in the road, one leads back to the Moon and the other is an outward spiral leading to a richer set of destinations including Mars.

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Peggy Whitson has spent more time in space than any other U.S. astronaut and commanded the latest mission (Expedition 16) onboard the International Space Station. Here she describes the wild ride of the Soyuz capsule on last month's return flight.

...over the next probably minute or so we built up to 8.2 Gs... after six months in zero gravity, that felt like a pretty long minute! ...I could feel my face being pulled back and it was pretty hard to breathe. The ground indicates that we hit once and then bounced and then rolled after that. My sensation was that we hit the ground and rolled.

I guess the old pilot's saying of 'any landing you can walk away from was a good one' probably applies here.

I think Soyuz is a very reliable spacecraft and I'm sure that the Russians will get to the bottom of the potential causes of why we were downmoding to the ballistic mode in an unexpected manner.

Some leaders of the space science community are pushing for trips to Near-Earth Asteroids or Mars instead of a return to the Moon. Huzzah! Private-sector participation would be enhanced. Nothing could be better than NASA and our next president being persuaded by the merits of these ideas....

...they will blog. I set up a blog site for SEDS and it is really taking off. [RSS feed]. It uses the Roller weblog system, which works pretty well for multi-user multi-blog system.

Being as 2007 is the 50th anniversary of spaceflight (Sputnik 1), it's fitting that a number of space-themed movies are in the works.

Sputnik (IMDB entry) and In the Shadow of the Moon (IMDB) are documentaries. Then there is the highly fictional Astronaut Farmer, with Billy Bob Thornton building a rocket in his barn. I'm looking forward to all three.

Follow this link to the HiRISE Operations Center to get the latest news on the project and some snapshots of my co-workers in action. We've completed the final sequence of calibration images before we arrive at Mars in March. Much of my work lately has been in fine-tuning our automated "Ground Data System" processing. Basically the idea is, whenever chunks of images come down to the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, we'll grab 'em, check 'em out and do everything to turn them into final products, ready to deliver to the public and the scientific community. And by we I really mean our software; the goal is to be entirely automated. So the past few days have tested this in a live setting. The spacecraft (Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, MRO) can transmit at up to 1.5 Mbps (about 187 kilobytes per second), roughly the speed of a cable modem, which is pretty good considering it is hundreds of millions of miles away. The folks at JPL's Deep Space Network have the difficult task of making sure all those bits are received here on Earth. There's a labyrinth of networks and servers within JPL's home near Pasadena, but eventually our images pop up on a particular file server where we can fetch them over a dedicated fiber optic line or Internet2. And hey, it has worked pretty damn well! Tuesday evening the first images started to trickle in, everything worked flawlessy, final data products started coming out the other side. I was actually excited later that night when the first problem occurred: an image file that was truncated or much smaller than expected. But we knew this could happen because of the difficulties in interplanetary communication... there is some window of time where they can have the spacecraft retransmit this "gappy" and/or truncated data, or they recover data from other DSN stations... but the new versions are not always better than the first... dealing with these new versions is one thing yet to be automated. Sometime Wednesday, the data rate was cranked up, and we are keeping up. My next task will be to design and build some kind of web-based reporting tool to keep track of these downlink operations when we do it "for real" while orbiting Mars!

For as long as I can remember, humans have ventured only a few hundred miles away from Earth. Apollo-Soyuz is the earliest NASA mission I remember clearly; it was the last Apollo mission, basically a publicity stunt but a fitting end to an era where two superpowers competed for supremacy in space. I remember the strange sight of Russians welcoming our astronauts; I guess I expected them to be hostile, or maybe look like Klingons.... Ironically, while we won the race to the Moon, we abandoned it after a few years. They focused on space stations and long duration spaceflight, building up the expertise for interplanetary voyages, but never embarking on them. So for 30+ years, humans haven't gone any farther than Low Earth Orbit. I think the Hubble servicing missions have gone the farthest out, a couple of hundred miles. All the interesting stuff is hundreds of thousands to or hundreds of millions miles away. Quietly in the last year, NASA has been turning the battleship around: to retire the shuttle and build craft to take us back to the Moon and on to Mars. One of the biggest moments came last week when the hardware plan to get us there was announced. This is pretty exciting stuff, even though it may be heavily based on old concepts. It'll be able to send 275 thousand pounds out of Earth orbit, significantly more than the Apollo V could. Crew will launch on a rocket that is essentially a Shuttle SRB (Solid Rocket Booster), with a second stage on top. The second stage will be powered by a single SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine). Cargo will launch on a rocket with two extended SRB's and five SSME's. So you're basically launching the weight of the shuttle, plus all of its cargo and then some, as pure mission-specific hardware. Plus it's all in-line with the booster, no wings hanging off on the side, in fact, no wings at all. So it takes many of the best elements of the Shuttle program (the SSME has never failed in 5 x 100+ shuttle missions, the SRB hasn't failed since the O-Ring caused Challenger disaster) and puts it together in new configurations that do one thing and do it well: move metric assloads far beyond Earth. Read More

Over at the amazing Encyclopedia Astronautica, a detailed look at the history of proposed Mars expeditions. My favorite is still Zubrin's Mars Direct.

Is it possible that life exists in the atmosphere of Venus?

Some scientists think so.