News and Commentary on Space
The Sci-Fi channel plans to produce a Mars-oriented reality program.
“Life on Mars” will place two teams of people in what Sci Fi says will be a realistic simulation of conditions on Earth’s neighbor, lack of oxygen presumably included. The “explorers” will then have to adapt to living in conditions that are almost literally otherworldly.
Say, you don’t suppose they got the idea from…naaah…
Caught this letter to the editor in the Peoria Journal Star over the weekend (why yes, I do travel a lot…funny you should ask). East Peoria resident Robin Miller points out the importance of space-based assets to the high-tech weaponry now being used in Iraq, and how our lack of rapid, responsive access to space leaves us vulnerable to attack against those assets. He builds a case (also articulated elsewhere) for a commercial/military partnership along the lines of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, by which the military would subsidize commercial access to space in exchange for use of commercial spacecraft for military “spacelift” purposes in times of need.
It doesn’t say so in the letter, but Miller is associated with the Libertarian Party in Illinois, and ran for U.S. Senate in 1996.
Mark Whittington suggests we forget Mars, and concentrate instead on the near-Earth asteroids.
Like the kid in the toy store, I have to ask: “Why can’t I have both?”
(Note the link is to the blog rather than the specific entry, due to Blogger archive problems.)
A sad essay on one man’s sense of despair over thirty-five rudderless years at NASA, culminating with the loss of Columbia.
Don’t despair, Robert — realizing that NASA is never going to get us anywhere is an important first step towards changing the status quo (in Hoffer’s terms, frustration with the status quo is the prerequisite for changing it).
Space.com has, nested in its article on the discovery of Columbia’s data recorder, an interesting bit of info. At the end of the article, they refer to General Kostelnik holding a conference in New Orleans this week on Shuttle life extension efforts. The interesting bit is the projected extend-to date, which is given here as 2015. The Shuttle is, once again, compared to the B-52 in terms of life-extension and upgrades and such.
2020? 2025? 2015? Who cares? So long as NASA doesn’t replace it with another NASA-only vehicle, and doesn’t try to maintain its human spaceflight monopoly to whatever end-date it ultimately chooses. In a perverse way, the longer the agency saddles itself with the Shuttle, the better it is for spaceflight overall. As the costs of maintaining and upgrading the fleet increase over time, the agency will have less and less money to spend on a replacement vehicle that undermines the market for private efforts…which could very well lead to vehicles that open space to settlement.
(Oh, and it really is interesting that the data recorder has been found. Hopefully they will get some useful info out of it. Despite its flaws, the Shuttle is presently the only game in town — a game which is suspended indefinitely, and needs to be resumed as soon as is practical.)
“No Exploration Without Colonization”.
Yeah, okay, it’s not terribly original. But it does get the point across, no?
In the latest Spacefaring Web, John Carter McKnight expands a bit on the events and themes of the meeting described in the press release below.
John Carter McKnight sends this:
News Release
Coalition of Space Groups and Leaders Unite in Call for Space Settlement as Core of Human Space flight Agenda
In the wake of the Columbia tragedy America has been engaged in a discussion as to the need for such activities and the real goals of our space program. To answer these questions, a group of space leaders, opinion makers, entrepreneurs and financiers met in Los Angeles this month to seek common agreement on guiding principles for the U.S. human space flight effort and begin coordinating strategies to provide a direction for a currently rudderless U.S. space program. The result was the formation of a strong consensus that the nation?s human space agenda needs a unifying central goal, that the current climate is hindering the opening of space, and that top level space policies must be changed if we are to ever open space to the people.
Mark Whittington of Curmudgeon’s Corner spreads the “colonization meme”.
I think he’s right in his argument that we need to change the purpose of going into space from ivory-tower data-gathering to the nuts and bolts of spreading civilization. Rationalizing and hiding what we really want behind the fig leaves of “exploration” and “science” and “space medicine” will only get us more exploration and science and space medicine…not settlements.
Cynically, though, I would expect that changing the goal from science to spreading civilization would simply make the critics change the form of their opposition. Instead of questioning whether humans should go rather than robots, they would question whether human civilization should be allowed to “taint” another planet — that is, whether human civilization is worthy of such expansion, or even the sort of self-preservation-by-budding that Mark (among others) suggests.
The movement into space is a human activity, which both depends on and exalts our uniquely human abilities (reason and creativity among them), and that is at the root of their opposition, and not so easily swept away by a unilateral change in the terms of the debate. It will simply morph into a different form.
Some time ago, I watched a television program on “up and coming ideas” in consumer goods, one of which was the ultrasonic washing machine. The machine cleaned clothes using a concept similar to ultrasonic cleaners used in jewelry stores and technical laboratories: immerse the garment in a low-concentration detergent solution and excite the water via ultrasonic transducers to “agitate” the soil from the fabric.
The motivation for this is the potential for such systems to take up less space, use less detergent and water, and consume less energy than a traditional washer. This design actually goes one step further, by incorporating the function of the dryer into the same machine.
This is, like the electrostatic precipitators used for home air cleaning, a technology with great potential for use in space stations and colonies.
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A young girl sets out to prove herself by resolving a long-forgotten mystery. But when she gets close to the truth, what she thought was a harmless adventure becomes a threat to the future of the independent commercial settlements on Mars.