MarsBlog.net

Too much to do, and too nice of weather outside for blogging right now.

Back after the Fourth…

Posted on June 24th, 2005 under Meta. Comments Off

One year after the first SpaceShipOne suborbital flight, White Knight conducted its first X-37 captive carry flight today.

Posted on June 21st, 2005 under Space Technology. Comments Off

The dastardly and nefarious planetary plans of the Planetary Society, noted front organization for the Space Nazi Brigades of the Military Industrial Complex™, have been outed by the heroic brave moonbats of Indymedia Chiapas:

Why the fraud?

What’s so bad about a “solar sail” that quietly wings its way through the “billions and billions” of stars in Carl Sagan’s cosmos that it requires this level of fanciful “travel to the stars in a human lifetime at 100,000 miles per hour” hype to overcome public resistance?

The problem is this: western society has a facility for euphemism. A mass, disorderly retreat by cowardly troops is a “strategic withdrawal of forces”. Genocide is called “rural pacification”. Legalized baby-killing is “choice”. Whores are “commercial sex workers”. A christian crusade against Islam is called a “war on terror”. And so on.

The pleasantly named “solar sail” evokes a scene of mostly harmless gentle motion in an airless void. Actually the “solar sail” is the latest attempt to orbit a highly reflective “space mirror” with all that that implies. In fact, the solar “sail” is PRECISELY a very highly reflective space mirror.

The secret’s out: solar sails are nothing more than cover for a super-duper double-top-secret orbiting space death ray mirror technology development and deployment scheme!

On the bright side, Bruce Gagnon and company should at least appreciate that it’s not nuclear powered. Indeed, what could be more environmentally friendly than clean, renewable, solar-powered mass destruction? It’s like getting all the apocalypse of a thermonuclear warhead, without all the pesky radioactive by-products and mutant roaches the size of shopping malls.

(Clearly the flap over space weaponization has crossed the line into self-parody.)

[via Jeff Foust]

UPDATE: Looks like the death-ray deployment failed.

Posted on June 21st, 2005 under Luddism. Comments: 1

NASA chief says shuttle schedule impossible to meet

Dr. Michael D. Griffin, the new administrator of NASA, said Thursday that there was no way the space shuttle fleet would be able to complete the 28 flights now planned before its retirement in 2010…

While the space agency is still studying how many missions the shuttles can undertake once they resume flight, as early as next month, Griffin said there could be as few as 15 and no more than 23, because of the time it takes to process and fly missions.

“I’ll be very strong on this,” he said in an interview. “We know that we cannot execute 28 flights between now and shuttle retirement.”

I know he says that Shuttle won’t continue past 2010, and I know that the Administration’s policy in this regard hasn’t (publicly) changed. But, I am still waiting for the announcement that, yes, Shuttle will indeed fly through 2011, 2012, whatever.

Posted on June 17th, 2005 under Space Policy. Comments Off

Bruce bemoans Bush’s handling of WMD evidence, while selectively ignoring contrarian views (some posted in his own blog) dismissing the much-fretted-over-of-late “Rods from God” concept and questioning its technical and economic feasibility.

Posted on June 17th, 2005 under Uncategorized. Comments Off

A little good news from my former coworkers: Hybrid rocket test at Edwards AFB is successful

The test took place on the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Test Stand 2-A, which sits on Leuhman Ridge overlooking Edward’s Rodgers dry lakebed and the surrounding Mojave Desert. The hybrid motor, which uses a rubberized fuel and liquid oxygen to create approximately 23,500 pounds of thrust was successfully tested on June 10 at 1304 local time. The test ran for the planned duration of 120 seconds and an initial review of the data indicated that the program objectives were met.

Posted on June 16th, 2005 under Space Technology. Comments Off

NASA Chief to Oust 20

New NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin has decided to replace about 20 senior space agency officials by mid-August in the first stage of a broad agency shake-up. The departures include the two leaders of the human spaceflight program, which is making final preparations to fly the space shuttle for the first time in more than two years.

Senior NASA officials and congressional and aerospace industry sources said yesterday that Griffin wanted to clear away entrenched bureaucracy and build a less political and more scientifically oriented team to implement President Bush’s plan to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars…

At the same time, the sources said, Griffin wants to restore NASA’s glamour, reasserting the engineering and science leadership that has been eroding since the Apollo era. To this end, the sources said, he is willing to oust up to 50 senior managers in a housecleaning rivaling the purge after the 1986 Challenger explosion. “Some people make a lot of changes, some people make a few,” said Ed Weiler, director of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “He’s going to want people that are on his wavelength, and his wavelength is that he’s an engineer and a scientist.”

The Prince, Chapter V: And he who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget. And what ever you may do or provide against, they never forget that name or their privileges unless they are disunited or dispersed but at every chance they immediately rally to them…But when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old prince, cannot agree in making one from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern themselves. For this reason they are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can gain them to himself and secure them much more easily.

Posted on June 10th, 2005 under Space Policy. Comments Off

It’s a blast from the space militarization past, as a couple of security guys stumble onto a pair of forgotten MOL spacesuits:

Two security officers were doing a check of the Launch Complex 5/6 museum, the former blockhouse from where the first American manned space flight was controlled. NASA Special Agent Dann E. Oakland and Henry Butler, Security Manager for Delaware North Parks and Resorts, discovered a locked room — and they did not have a key.

Using a master key for the facility, the locked door was eventually opened. With no power, the room had evidently not been in use by people in many years. The officers used flashlights to explore the room and make their find.

Apparently, there was a lot of old film inside, which was deteriorated and deemed a fire hazard. The article doesn’t specify what happened to it, though, or what was on it or whether it was recoverable. (Thanks for the tease, Space.com.)

Besides the film, Oakland and Butler found the two blue spacesuits “complete and in remarkable shape,” as they were described by the suits’ manufacturer who examined them.

“The suits were stored in their original shipping container with extra sets of gloves of various sizes,” described Oakland. “The inside of the container’s lid had the holder for the flight data files and a hand painted NASA logo.”

This reminds me of a tale I heard back in the early nineties, at a lecture by a guy who had been some sort of IT expert at the Pentagon. He claimed that, during a network upgrade in the 1980s, he noticed something peculiar on one of the original blueprints of the building — it showed a door into an office, where there was no door in reality. He and his partner checked the offices on both sides, to see if the hallway door had been closed off and replaced by an door to an adjoining office, but there were no other doors. They obtained permission, and broke through the wall where the door should have been…and found an ordinary office inside, outfitted with unused desks, (dead) phone, and other office equipment dating from the 1940s, which had been inadvertently sealed off at some point between the time the building was completed and when it was occupied. The Pentagon being as large as it is, the “lost” office went unnoticed for forty-odd years. (Sounds like an urban legend, but I don’t see it listed at Snopes.)

Another thing this reminds me of, more relevant to NASA, is the “discovery” of a set of F-1 and J-1 engines (five each) at Michoud Assembly Facility in 2001. They had been sitting in a crib in a disused pressure test cell for thirty years, covered with plastic tarp and protected (laughably, given the New Orleans climate) with numerous bags of dessicant. A lot of people at Michoud knew the engines were there (I stumbled on them myself in 1999), but apparently NASA did not — from what I heard at the time, an inventory of all F-1 engines in storage and museums conducted during the late 1980s (for possible use on a large booster, either Shuttle-C or ALS/NLS, I forget which) missed these units. Once “discovered”, they were promptly loaded onto flatbeds and hauled off to Marshall, with at least one of each engine going (word has it) to the Smithsonian.

Posted on June 5th, 2005 under Space Technology. Comments Off