MarsBlog.net

Opportunity Successfully Rolls Onto Mars’ Surface

Posted on January 31st, 2004 under Space Science. Comments Off

Apparently, St. John is concerned with Pete Aldridge’s connections to industry, and in particular his role in approving the 767 subsidy chronic mismanagement bailout tanker lease agreement for Boeing:
McCain Calls for Change on Space Panel.

A Boeing official wrote in an April 2003 e-mail: “this [tanker] deal better close in DOD on pete aldridge’s watch, because it probably won’t close on mike wynne’s watch.” Michael W. Wynne has served as acting undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics since Aldridge’s departure.

McCain claimed that Aldridge had a “cozy relationship” with Boeing and now he is concerned that Aldridge’s decision-making on the commission might be influenced by his position on Lockheed’s board.

Hmm. So, Pete is a member of Lockheed Martin’s board, but he gave cozy deals to Boeing?

Posted on January 31st, 2004 under Space Policy. Comments Off

The other eight members of the new Presidential Commission on the Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy (hopefully to be known by the shorthand name “Aldrige Commission”) have been announced:

• Pete Aldridge
  • Former Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics;
  • Past service as Secretary of the US Air Force, senior management associate at OMB, and in a variety of other Department of Defense roles, focusing on strategic planning, management of Air Force space programs, and reconnaissance operations;
  • Astronaut trainee, August-November 1985. Would have been payload specialist on first Shuttle launch from Vandenberg;
  • Past employee of The Aerospace Corporation, McDonnell Douglas, LTV Aerospace;
  • Board member of Lockheed Martin;
  • GAO: E.C. Pete Aldrige Biography.
• Carly Fiorina
  • Chairman and Chief Executive of Hewlett-Packard (bio);
  • Notable for pushing through the 2002 HP-Compaq merger against stockholder opposition;
  • Previously with AT&T and Lucent Technologies;
  • Bachelor?s degree in medieval history and philosophy from Stanford University; MBA from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland at College Park, Md; master of science degree from MIT?s Sloan School.
• Michael P. Jackson
  • Former Deputy Secretary at Department of Transportation;
  • Former Chief Operating Officer at Lockheed Martin IMS?s Transportation Systems and Services;
  • Senior Vice President and Counselor to the President of the American Trucking Associations;
  • Researcher at the American Enterprise Institute;
  • Taught political science at the University of Georgia and at Georgetown University.
• Laurie Ann Leshin
  • Planetary geochemist and associate professor of geological sciences at Arizona State University (alumni profile);
  • Director of ASU’s Center for Meteorite Studies;
  • Member of Mars Polar Lander mission team;
  • Teaches classes in spacecraft mission design;
  • Author of paper estimating an abundance of water on Mars, based on studies of deuterium in Martian meteorites;
  • Falls on the humans or humans-and-robots side of the humans-robots debate. Has significant professional focus on Mars.
• Gen. Lester Lyles
  • Former commander, Air Force Materiel Command;
  • Former director, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). Clementine mission to the Moon was conducted during his tenure;
  • Official BMDO bio.
• Paul Spudis
  • Visiting scientist with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston;
  • Deputy Leader, Clementine Project Science Team;
  • LPI homepage (bio and resume material);
  • Author: The Once and Future Moon (science).
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
  • Astrophysicist and Director, Hayden Planetarium, New York City.
  • Member, Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry (Walker Commission);
  • Research interests: structure of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the formation of stars, supernovas, and dwarf galaxies.
  • AMNH website .
  • Curriculum vitae.
  • Visiting research scientist in the Department of Astrophysics at Princeton University;
  • Author/Co-author: Cosmic Origins, Cosmic Frontiers: Astronomy at the Cutting Edge, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist (Memoir), One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos (available online here), Just Visiting this Planet, Universe Down to Earth, Merlin’s Tour of the Universe;
  • B.A. in Physics from Harvard University. Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia University;
  • Extensive work in public outreach and science education, particularly in inner-city schools in New York.
• Rep. Robert S. Walker
  • Former U.S. Representative (R-Pa, 16th District), former Chairman of the House Science Committee;
  • Chairman, Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry (Walker Commission);
  • Chairman of Wexler and Walker Public Policy Associates, an independent unit of international public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, Inc. (hmm…);
  • Lectures at the Brookings Institution, the Georgetown University Government Affairs Institute, the Kennedy School at Harvard University, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center;
  • Board member of the Aerospace Corporation, SpaceDev, and the Space Foundation.
• Maria Zuber
  • Mars scientist, E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Head of Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences;
  • MIT homepage;
  • Personal homepage (CV and publications);
  • Involved with Dawn Mission to Vesta and Ceres, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission, MESSENGER Mission to Mercury, NEAR Mission, MGS MOLA, BMDO/NASA Clementine Mission, Mars Observer Mission.

In abstract, the board is made up of a mixture of government, industry, and academic types. The academics represent each of NASA’s non-aeronatics threads (space science, human exploration, educational outreach). There is a heavy defense representation on the government side, along with connections to the legislative branch (particularly the House, which controls the purse). Mars exploration is as well represented as Lunar exploration (if not better) and astrophysics and astronomy, with practically zero representation for non-aligned manned pursuits such as space medicine and ISS science. Aldridge himself is the only person on the board with a significant link to Shuttle. There appears to be little expertise among the nine with manned spacecraft design or mission planning, but plenty of experience with missile (ie: launcher) design and robotic mission planning and instrument design.

The most interesting appointments, I think, are Leshin and Zuber. Much (perhaps most) of their professional work has involved Mars, and this makes me a bit more comfortable that Mars will be kept in focus as the end-goal of this new policy as the policy’s particulars are ironed out.

Posted on January 31st, 2004 under Space Policy. Comments Off

Apparently, Sean O’Keefe is considering using Soyuz as the ISS crew ferry vehicle, even after RTF.

The article points out that NASA may end up having to buy seats from the Russians, but I hardly see that as a crippling expense. If you take the going rate for a Soyuz flight as $20M/person, and assume that the three-man crew is fully-rotating (that is, no taxi pilot), and that current crew composition rules apply, that means paying the Russians at most $40M for a crew rotation. How much would it cost to send those same two astronauts up on a Shuttle…particularly if it means sending a Shuttle up on a rotation-only flight that might otherwise be eliminated? Granted, the cost of additional Progress flights would have to be added in, since the rotation-only flight would probably carry an MPLM along for resupply — eliminating that means moving those supplies to multiple Progress flights. But it’s hard to see it needing to cost any more than Shuttle, overall.

Also mentioned is the possibility of keeping two Soyuz docked to ISS, as a means of achieving the six-person crew target. How shockingly obvious.

Posted on January 30th, 2004 under Space Policy. Comments Off

Space.com has the highlights of the 2005 budget request for NASA, the first to reflect the change of policy for the agency.

What’s interesting here is that the spending tracks the new policy. Money is being shifted from Earth science programs and non-aligned ISS research to planetary exploration activities, including increased funding for the Mars Science Laboratory nuclear-powered 2009 rover. Meanwhile, JIMO survives (though it slips three years to the right) as does New Horizons.

Easily overlooked is the reduction in funding for space technology development. This could be good or bad, depending on what sorts of programs that actually affects — good if it results in the remaining resources being focused on those near-, middle-, and long-term technologies with realistic prospects for yielding useful hardware; bad if it means those technologies get thrown out with the pie-in-the-sky stuff, or if all of the technologies currently being investigated are starved equally rather than being put through programmatic triage.

The request also provides $10M in the ISS budget to fund flight demonstration of startup launch services. It doesn’t seem like $10M would go very far in that arena, but NASA need not fund such flight demonstrations in full — providing a small subsidy or the incentive of a “bonus check” for a successful flight could help startups obtain financing from other sources, especially if the initiative is truly structured as a first step towards a market for such services.

Posted on January 30th, 2004 under Space Policy. Comments Off

Spirit is back in working order, and Opportunity may have confirmed the presence of hematite in Meridiani without even bothering to move off its lander.

Posted on January 30th, 2004 under Space Science. Comments Off

Rand Simberg pointed out yesterday that it was the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. I was too young to remember that event (being about two and a half years pre-birth at that time), but I do remember what happened eighteen years ago today.

Many of the people I work with were involved with the Shuttle program at that time, so I heard several different “where I was” accounts today.

Me, I was a junior in high school. I had lunch period starting around noon. A few minutes into lunch, one of my friends (a big space nut, who had been to space camp several times and knew all sorts of Shuttle specs and arcana by heart) came in and sat very quietly at the table. He was white as a ghost, and from the look on his face something was very obviously wrong.

We asked him if he was okay, and he told us that the Space Shuttle had just blown up. For a moment, there was silence, and then we all scoffed…”Naaaah, you’re just joking!” Was there even a Shuttle launch scheduled that day? Did anyone (besides Joe) even pay attention to the boring old Shuttle anymore? It had to be a joke, and he had done a good job of faking us out there, for a moment anyhow.

But no, he insisted that it was true. After trying for several minutes to convince us, someone suggested looking for a television — surely it would be all over the networks if the story were true. For most of us, our next period was a programming class (Pascal, on the original Macintosh), and someone remembered that there was a big TV hanging on the wall in the computer lab, one the teacher sometimes used as a monitor for instruction purposes.

When we got there and rigged the monitor up as a receiver again, the first thing we saw was the now famous footage of the forked exhaust plumes hanging in the sky, the SRBs spiralling away out of control to either side of the big white cloud that had just recently been a fully-fueled Shuttle.

At that point, we began to believe him.

Unsurprisingly, we didn’t do any programming work in class that day. Instead, we watched the explosion footage over and over, from a couple different angles, and the footage of the reactions from the crowds gathered to watch the launch live — most notably in the auditorium of Christa McAuliffe’s school. Here were these kids, some not much younger than we were, watching and cheering, and then suddenly growing very quiet and wide-eyed, and then bursting into tears and sobs.

I don’t recall being all that upset at the time (any more than I was when Columbia burned up a year ago Sunday), but at some point later, the footage of the launch, and especially the images of the forked plumes, became unwatchable.

This afternoon, in a staff meeting at work, someone played a video, in which the signature footage of the two disasters was compiled together to illustrate why safety and doing the job right is so important. Sure enough, there was the famous “Go for throttle-up”/forked plume footage from Challenger, and after it came some footage (obviously more recent) from inside Mission Control at JSC. In this footage, the controllers are sitting at their stations, watching the monitors, as a series of blips track Columbia’s progress along its planned ground track. There are a few snatches of radio traffic, in which the crew is told that everything looks fine, aside from some slightly high readings from the wheel-well sensors, and is asked to repeat the last message. Then, a burst of unintelligible audio. Then a voice saying over and over, “Columbia, Houston, please respond…”. From there, the video switches to the now-famous footage of the comet streaking across Texas…..which was, like the plume footage from Challenger, the first thing I saw on television after being told about the accident.

It didn’t have quite the impact that the Challenger footage used to have, but it was much more disturbing than it was last year, when the accident happened. I suppose it takes a while for the importance and emotional impact of some historical events to sink in.

At the time of the Challenger accident, there was a brief time (a few days, maybe a week) when it was an open question whether the U.S. would go back to space, whether the Shuttles would ever fly again. But soon, we were assured that yes, the fleet would “return to flight” (a phrase I never expected to hear again after watching STS-26 lift off, between classes in a friend’s dorm room, having just started my second year in college by that time). And a year and a half later, NASA announced that a fifth flight Orbiter would be built — surely a sign that the program and the U.S. presence in space would continue.

Little did we know that it would continue going around in circles for the next fourteen-plus years.

After the Columbia accident, it looked to me even more likely that the U.S. might give up on space. Not at first, no, and not highly likely, but much more likely than after Challenger. The ISS program was long-delayed and massively over budget, and it was becoming apparent even to the public that it would never live up to the promises made for it. NASA had lost two Mars probes due to (frankly) stupid mistakes, and had botched yet another attempt to build a replacement for Shuttle, prompting many to wonder if the agency still had “what it takes”. And when presented with the opportunity to renew public interest and enthusiasm for its mission by opening the hatches of ISS to a nascent space tourism business, NASA peevishly informed the citizenry that space was not for them, but only for an elect few subsidized supermen who were above such pedestrian things as paying for the trip and enjoying it as an end in itself (yes, it was mostly Dan Goldin, but the agency as a whole bore the mark for his sins). It was not looking good for NASA, after February 1, 2003.

But…

There had also been, for some time preceding the accident, calls from the space advocacy community for a new vision for NASA, something more meaningful and productive than growing bean sprouts and tadpoles in microgravity. And this accident has ultimately brought that call to the forefront.

This time around, the loss of an Orbiter has indeed meant the cancellation of the Space Shuttle program — but not immediately, and not in a way that results in our having no space program left at all. As I noted here on the day before Columbia’s final launch, it took a terrible shock for the agency — and the Administration — to get serious about a new approach to getting to space, and to find a new purpose for doing so.

It’s too early to say whether this latest effort will bear fruit any better than its predecessors of the past two decades. But with any luck, on the eighteenth anniversary of the Columbia accident, we’ll be able to look back on some real progress in opening up space.

And with a whole lot of luck, we may be doing that looking back from Mars.

[Update: the time stamp on this post is deceiving -- I actually published it after midnight on the 28th, but the date reflects when I first saved the draft. Hence the text appears to be a day out of synch with the anniversaries.]

Posted on January 27th, 2004 under Columbia Accident. Comments Off

Somebody should have told NASA not to use Outlook to send messages to the rovers:

Nasa scientists say hundreds of computer files that have accumulated on the Mars rover Spirit may be the cause of problems that have crippled it.

Posted on January 27th, 2004 under Space Science. Comments Off

A New Zealand physicist is nominating himself for the mission to Mars.

Posted on January 27th, 2004 under Space Policy. Comments: 3