The Vacuous Promise of Living in Outer Space

Enjoy Outer Space! I’ll Stay on Earth.
Excerpt:

Are we really all going to go live in outer space? Budding space Wonka Jeff Bezos had a big event last week to say it’s coming, that his rocket company Blue Origin will help make it possible, but—not to sound like an intergalactic wet blanket—I’m on the fence about abandoning Earth, and schlepping off to the stars. Yes, I know I may not have a choice: that overpopulation, climate change and cable news may eventually make our current planet an impossible place to live. What I’m asking is: What if it’s optional? What if living in outer space is a choice? I’m not sure I need to go.

Comment: Images: 1st, 2nd

https://t.co/HWQve5CYZA pic.twitter.com/wyvbQ9dZmV

— 𝓙𝓲𝓶 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓽 (@jrpeet) June 26, 2019

Jeff Bezos: I spend my billions on space because we're destroying Earth https://t.co/uarrWAF97L

— 𝓙𝓲𝓶 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓽 (@jrpeet) July 17, 2019

Better: Pray now ... and don't worry about it!

Congress hears options for asteroid defense: Pay now or pray later

Excerpt:

Lawmakers repeatedly asked how much advance warning would be required to deflect a threatening asteroid, and were repeatedly told that it would take years. Shelton said that if time was limited, "probably nuclear energy is what we're talking about." But even a nuclear-armed mission to blast an asteroid, Bruce Willis-style, would require lots of lead time. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., asked Bolden about the strategy for dealing with an Earth-threatening asteroid that was discovered with three weeks' warning. "If it's coming in three weeks ... pray," Bolden said. "The reason I can't do anything in the next three weeks is because for decades we have put it off."

Comment: NASA is always looking for ways to justify its existence.

Moon Base folly

A moon colony is a waste of money

 Excerpts:

Newt Gingrich has absorbed a fair degree of ridicule for his campaign proposal to build an American colony on the moon. Before focusing the laughter solely on Gingrich, however, let's recall that it is the declared policy of the U.S. government to return a human being to the moon by 2020, in preparation for sending a human astronaut to Mars. If Gingrich is wrong (and he is), he's not wrong alone.

As you read this, an international space station is orbiting Earth, staffed by a crew of six (currently, three Russians, two Americans and one astronaut from the European Union). Cost to date: $100 billion.

... The useful space science these days is done by unmanned probes and satellites: the Cassini-Huygens mission that returned amazing images of Saturn and its moons; the Calipso mission to monitor the health of Earth's atmosphere; the Juno mission now en route to Jupiter. In November 2011, NASA launched its latest Mars probe, Curiosity. Curiosity should reach Mars by August.

Here's the great thing about all these missions: They do not need to be engineered to zero defect, and no plans need be made to return them home. Unmanned space exploration need not worry about food and water or the effects of isolation and low-gravity on the human spirit and body. But once human beings are inserted, everything changes. Lives are put at risk. Costs soar. And for what? Most of the research purpose of sending human beings into space is to test the effects of sending human beings into space. The missions exist to test whether the missions can continue. This seems the very definition of futility.

... The pictures from Saturn are pretty wonderful, and so will be the pictures from Jupiter, and no astronaut was needed to capture them. The hard truth to deliver to the laid-off engineers on Florida's space coast is that space exploration is another industry where automation has reduced the number of human employees needed. To propose putting 13,000 human beings on the moon is a lot like proposing to return to the days when steel mills employed tens of thousands of people. It's not a vision of the future. It's nostalgia.

Comment: Image: Clavius Base from 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Last Shuttle

Final NASA shuttle mission clouded by rancor

Excerpt:

Cost will always tarnish the shuttle’s reputation. Once sold to Congress with promises of weekly flights for just $7 million a pop, the shuttle program never managed to make spaceflight routine or inexpensive. The shuttle program, in its totality, has cost more than a billion dollars per flight.

Comment: Let's see .... $ 1,000,000,000 to $ 7,000,000 to ... that's 142 to 1

Water on the Moon ... another excuse for wasted space exploration!

Moon Not Only Has Water, but Lots of It

Excerpt:

"It's really wet," said Anthony Colaprete, co-author of one of the Science papers and a space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. He and his colleagues estimate that 5.6% of the total mass of the targeted lunar crater's soil consists of water ice. In other words, 2,200 pounds of moon dirt would yield a dozen gallons of water.

The presence of water doesn't make it more likely that there ever was life on the moon, as the location studied is among the coldest in the solar system. But the large quantity boosts the case for a manned lunar base from which to launch other interplanetary adventures. Water is crucial because its components, hydrogen and oxygen, are key ingredients for rocket fuel. Oxygen can also be extracted from water to make breathable air.

Finding a water source on the moon has long been a dream, because it could save on the expense of transporting it from earth. A bottle of water on the moon would run about $50,000, according to NASA, because that is what it costs, per pound, to launch anything to earth's nearest neighbor.

Comment: Waste of money! A genuine way to help people on the earth (besides the Gospel!): Desalination

Why Pentium chips still rule space

Space exploration: The computers that power man's conquest of the stars

Excerpts:

To this day, Nasa still uses elements of technology that powered the moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s, while the International Space Station (ISS) - the manned station circling the Earth 250 miles above our heads - relies on processors dating back more than two decades.

...

When it comes to spacecraft, design reliability - and not bleeding edge technology - is the watchword, with onboard chips having to undergo extensive testing to prove their robustness and compatibility with the spacecraft's onboard software.

Each of its computer chips has to be "hardened" to protect it from the high-energy radiation that permeates outer space, a complex process that means the newest processors are almost never used onboard spacecraft.

..

Just speccing out and procuring the three Pentium chips for the upgrade has taken years, due to budgetary constraints and the need to design the hardware to minimise conflicts with the onboard system software.

"The challenge is trying to build new technology that looks like the old technology - you don't want to impact the software so it has to look as much like the old hardware as possible," said David Pruett, a former software and computer system manager for the space station who now works for Nasa contractor GeoControl Systems.

..

According to Dr Norman Kluksdahl, systems engineer with the mission operations facilities division at Nasa mission control, upgrades must be performed in parallel with the normal station operation.

"Then we have to seamlessly hand over [from the old software to the new software]," he told silicon.com. "I would equate it to driving your car down the road at 80km an hour and changing the tyre while you're moving."

To avoid any unwanted surprises, every new software revision goes through two and a half years of development, planning and testing before being uploaded to the station.

...

Due to the complex and costly nature of upgrading ground control systems in ESOC, ESA will sometimes run an entire satellite mission - which can last several years - without performing an upgrade to the original hardware, OS or applications.

Consequently ESOC runs computers of varying ages, with the oldest machines dating back at least 15 years, with ESOC staff having to support these legacy machines alongside the modern HP workstations used to control the newer satellite missions.

...

Maintaining such aged hardware unsurprisingly brings challenges such as getting hold of spares to repair computers that are no longer being made or finding staff with the skills needed to maintain software written in old languages.

"You have a problem with the availability of expertise: to find a good Fortran programmer or someone that can work on the VMS [Virtual Memory System] OS is not easy today - you don't find many young people who want to do that," Merri said.

...

Today Mission Control Center has 550 workstations linked to 150 servers running 23 different sub-systems.

Since 1996, Nasa has used standardised Unix workstations in both the shuttle and space station flight control rooms, which system engineer Kluksdahl said has greatly simplified their running.

Before the 1996 revamp the flight control rooms relied upon a patchwork of incompatible computer hardware of varying ages, which needed custom-built interfaces to get them to work together.

"If you replaced one piece of it, you either had to redevelop the old interface [between the machines in the flight control room] for the new hardware or you had to replace the whole building at once.

"Because the machines were obsolete, procuring spare parts was difficult and it became almost impossible," Kluksdahl said, adding that Nasa staff had to hunt out spare parts on the second-hand computer market.

Comment: The simplicity of the Apollo computer is interesting. A simulator of the Eagle lander is available for XP

"anything a human being does up there could be done by unmanned machinery for one-thousandth the cost"

Is Manned Spaceflight Obsolete?

Excerpt:

... manned space exploration as a national goal — to be financed from public funds, organized by state or federal employees to promote some general good like stronger defenses, economic dynamism, social stability or public health — is another question altogether.

There is no case for publicly funded human spaceflight in any of those areas. Even in the matter of defense, none of the most useful off-planet projects — G.P.S., earth imaging, antimissile technology — has any requirement for human beings in space.

It is in fact a universal principle of space science — a “prime directive,” as it were — that anything a human being does up there could be done by unmanned machinery for one-thousandth the cost. With the ever-increasing intelligence of our machines, the cost gap will only get wider.

Comment: Full article presents three views. My view is the above!

NASA: "a mismatch between resources and rhetoric."

Obama space panel says moon return plan is a no go

Excerpt:

A White House panel of independent space experts says NASA's return-to-the-moon plan just won't fly.

The problem is money. The expert panel estimates it would cost about $3 billion a year beyond NASA's current $18 billion annual budget.

"Under the budget that was proposed, exploration beyond Earth is not viable," panel member Edward Crawley, a professor of aeronautics at MIT, told The Associated Press Tuesday.

The report gives options to President Barack Obama, but said NASA's current plans have to change. Five years ago, then-President George W. Bush proposed returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. To pay for it, he planned on retiring the shuttle next year and shutting down the international space station in 2015.

All those deadlines have to change, the panel said. Space exploration would work better by including other countries and private for-profit firms, the panel concluded.

The panel had previously estimated that the current plan would cost $100 billion in spending to 2020.

Former NASA associate administrator Alan Stern said the report showed the harsh facts that NASA's space plans had "a mismatch between resources and rhetoric." Now, he said, Obama faces a choice of "essentially abandoning human spaceflight" or paying the extra money.

The panel, chaired by retired Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, includes executives, scientists and ex-astronauts. It posted a summary report Tuesday on both White House and NASA web sites.

NASA can't get beyond low-Earth orbit without spending more, but space travel with astronauts is important, the panel found. That will cost an extra $3 billion a year and is "unquestionably worth it," Crawley said.

The question is where to go.

The Bush plan was to go to the moon, which would serve as a training ground for flights to Mars. The Augustine panel agreed Mars is the ultimate goal, but said going to the moon first is only one option and not the preferred one. Instead, the panel emphasized what it called a "flexible path" of exploring near-Earth objects such as asteroids, the moons of Mars, and then landing on the moon after other exploration.

"There's a lot of places in the neighborhood," Crawley said. "In fact, going to the moon is more difficult than going to a near-Earth object."

Comment: This was the plot of Armageddon

ISS captures Sarychev Peak Eruption

NASA: Sarychev Peak Eruption, Kuril Islands

Excerpt:

A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev Volcano (Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain, and it is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island. Prior to June 12, the last explosive eruption occurred in 1989, with eruptions in 1986, 1976, 1954, and 1946 also producing lava flows. Ash from the multi-day eruption has been detected 2,407 kilometers east-southeast and 926 kilometers west-northwest of the volcano, and commercial airline flights are being diverted away from the region to minimize the danger of engine failures from ash intake.

Comment: Very cool. More photos here.

Is NASA out of control?

NASA has become a transition problem for Obama

Excerpt:

NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is “not qualified” to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.

In a heated 40-minute conversation last week with Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, a red-faced Griffin demanded to speak directly to Obama, according to witnesses.

In addition, Griffin is scripting NASA employees and civilian contractors on what they can tell the transition team and has warned aerospace executives not to criticize the agency’s moon program, sources said.

Griffin’s resistance is part of a no-holds-barred effort to preserve the Constellation program, the delayed and over-budget moon rocket that is his signature project.

Comment: The Constellation program would put US astronauts on the moon in 2019.