MarsBlog.net

An article last week in Aerospace Daily & Defense Report (sorry, no link) covered Mike Griffin’s speech at the Inside Aerospace symposium, in which he had some interesting things to say about the industry.

“We, the country, don’t get enough back for what we spend” on space, Griffin told attendees of the Inside Aerospace symposium sponsored by the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Space Foundation. “That means we don’t get enough product for the amount of people’s time invested in these activities. We have too many people doing every job we do.”

Note that the “we” here apparently means the aerospace industry, in the context of the comment, rather than NASA.

Since the country is not likely in the future to be willing to spend much more on space than it does now, “if we want to see the space enterprise survive, it can’t continue to cost what it does for what it produces,” he said.

Huh. I wonder how much of this excessive cost-to-product-value relationship has to do with overhead imposed by the customer on the contractors, constant changes in requirements, inconsistent or conflicting requirements, etc.

Griffin pointed to the space shuttle program, which costs $4.5 billion each year to maintain, not counting launches, due to the standing army of people it employs. The time to safeguard new projects such as the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) against such excesses is now, he said. “We can only fix the new things, and we have one chance, and that’s before we start,” he said.

This, on the other hand, is an excellent point, and one I hope NASA keeps in mind throughout the Constellation program. Many of Shuttle’s problems with cost and complexity are the result of shortsighted compromises in the design, which kept short-term or development costs low in exchange for astronomical (!) operations costs over the life of the program.

This is…surprising:

He also said he had the CEV team go through all the “standard NASA boilerplate” in the CEV request for proposals (RFP) prior to its release and “weed out” contractual requirements for deliverables that NASA didn’t think it would need. This delayed the release of the RFP somewhat. A similar process will take place for the CLV RFP and future procurements, he said.

Good grief — while this may be true, if what they gave us was trimmed down, I’d like to know how many more DRDs there would have been had they not “weeded out” the ones they didn’t think they’d need. It’s also worth noting that there were several DRDs that one might have expected NASA would need that weren’t there, and that the consensus is that NASA didn’t do a similar “weeding out” on the CEV requirements generally and is only now adjusting some of those that conflict.

Posted on April 30th, 2006 under Space Policy. Comments: 2

Monday is the 26th anniversary of Operation Eagle Claw — another high point of the unfortunate Carter presidency.

The Wikipedia article claims that the May issue of The Atlantic will have an article on the failed mission by Mark Bowden, of Black Hawk Down fame. The details of the mission ought to make for some interesting reading, as the Wikipedia description of the plan make it seem incredible, in a “They were going to do what?” way.

Posted on April 23rd, 2006 under Miscellaneous. Comments: 1

It was too nice outside to spend the day painting, so I went for a drive.

An area called “Hidden Valley Ranch” south of Mt. Evans (part of which is visible in the distance).

A feature down the road which is apparently called “Lion’s Head”. From further up the road, it looks like a half-size version of Devil’s Tower.

Of course, the price we pay for living in such picturesque surroundings is the risk of fire. This is either part of the area burned by the 2000 High Meadows Fire or the northern extent of the 2002 Hayman Fire.

Damage from the 2002 Hayman Fire, seen through a haze reminiscent of New Orleans in summer. Along the road in this area, the county has put up ‘Barbasol’ signs, reminding visitors via rhyme that all this damage to a forest they admire was the result of a single fire. (No mention of poor forest management practices or heartbreak-induced arson…but I imagine that kind of thing is difficult to fit onto little signposts.)

A storm was moving in, providing some interesting light details. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really planned to go driving around taking pictures, and left all my camera filters at home — this does poor justice to the real view.

This image does a better job of capturing the shafts of light, thanks to some heavy tweaking of the gammas.

The storm that was moving in produced the usual “thundersleet”, which looks a bit like this image from two weeks ago:

(Click on the image and you’ll actually see the falling sleet. The sleet on the ground accumulated in about three minutes, the time it took me to notice it and grab my camera. This is what I get in lieu of thunderstorms, thanks to the altitude and topography.)

And to think that just three weeks ago, downtown Conifer looked like this:

…and I was commuting in this:

Posted on April 23rd, 2006 under Meta. Comments Off

A blog-carnival exposing anti-space silliness for ridicule and scorn, and otherwise showcasing funny space- and science-related news items.

• Now we know why the “Face on Mars” looks like it’s wearing a batting helmet.

• Emboldened by the success of his cable TV network, Gore is making the jump to crockumentaries. Look out Michael Moore!
• But who cares about “global warming” when we have “May 25, 2006 – the Day of Destiny!” looming?
• Putting first things first. Just hope the waste collection system isn’t pointing in the same direction. (I wonder if dealing with things like this is going to be on the agenda.)

Posted on April 23rd, 2006 under Luddism. Comments: 3

A new twist on the nuclear thermal rocket: forget the uranium, use antimatter:

When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.

Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy…

Positrons are directed from the storage unit to the attenuating matrix, where they interact with the material and release heat. Liquid hydrogen (H2) circulates through the attenuating matrix and picks up the heat. The hydrogen then flows to the nozzle exit (bell-shaped area in yellow and blue), where it expands into space, producing thrust.

Not quite as sexy as the science fiction versions (which, it has to be admitted, are typically a bit sketchy on the details), but whatever works.

Such an engine would be safer for the astronauts and for the environment for several reasons: it would reduce the travel time to Mars, increasing safety for the crew by reducing their exposure to cosmic rays; the reactor would not be radioactive after its fuel is used; and there should be no risk for the public even if the reactor exploded during its launch because “gamma rays would be gone in an instant.”

Uh-huh…as would a good chunk of the spaceport. I don’t want to sound like the Atomic Fearmonger here, but I suspect that being “gone in an instant” would be small comfort to the living things that shower of gamma rays passed through along the way.

(And speaking of Bruce, who I haven’t lampooned much lately, how can someone read the accounts of the recent protests in France against reforms to unsustainable employment regulations aimed at reducing youth unemployment and get the story so completely wrong? I guess the facts don’t matter when you see the world through Marx-colored glasses.)

Posted on April 21st, 2006 under Space Technology. Comments: 5

This is an interesting bit of technological development, but it’s hard to see how it could ever be practical over any distance with a noticeable communications time lag. Still, if you have low-lag communications between far-flung settlements on the Moon or Mars, it may be one way to better utilize diffusely-distributed medical resources.

[via aaron_j]

Posted on April 21st, 2006 under Space Technology. Comments: 1

It seems to have passed unnoticed, but yesterday was the 27th anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s proudest moment:

In 1979 the Swamp Rabbit enjoyed a brief stint of notoriety when one of its number had a close encounter with Jimmy Carter. In April of that year, as President Carter was fishing on a small pond on his farm, a visibly agitated Swamp Rabbit approached his boat and tried to board. Carter, used a paddle to splash water at the rabbit in order to dissuade it from swimming towards the boat. The press dubbed this the “Killer Rabbit.” The incident was captured photographically, and the image is in the public domain courtesy of The Jimmy Carter Library.

Weird as that is, this is Luddite Pillory material.

Posted on April 21st, 2006 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

More emerging technology with application to space settlement: Plant Extracts Arsenic from Polluted Soil

The technique of using plants to clean up polluted soil in order to make poisons less harmful is called “phytoremediation,” and has proven viable for removing arsenic. But arsenic collected from the soil is stored in the plant root, which makes safe harvesting and disposal a challenge.

Meagher and his team genetically modified Arabidopsis, a small member of the mustard family, to be arsenic-resistant and to move the arsenic collected in its root up to its shoots. The new method is much more efficient, too, soaking up 16 times more arsenic than normal Arabidopsis plants.

“We want a 35- to 50-fold increase in these plants’ ability to sequester arsenic, and now that we understand the mechanism, we believe that is possible,” Meagher said.

Imagine what further development of this technology will be able to do for settlements on the Moon and Mars, where useful elements may be too diffuse to mine economically by conventional techniques, and where adapting conventional mining techniques to such radically different environments may itself be impractical. This technology would be especially useful in the early years of settlement, as it would employ similar infrastructure to that required for agriculture (or for human occupation, for that matter) rather than the high-energy conventional extraction methods and the complex, integrated industrial base which supports them.

On the other hand, just because the plants concentrate a particular element in their leaves or stems doesn’t mean that you get off this easy. Some processing of the biomass would still be required, and that is likely to be energy intensive.

Of course, phytoremediating bacteria would probably be a better choice for industrial-scale extraction — they could be used in a continuous/bulk process (rather than in discrete growing cycles), and would probably allow a greater efficiency in terms of equipment, energy, and space used.

Posted on April 16th, 2006 under Space Technology. Comments: 1

Too busy with work on the house, and again, not a whole lot of material this week aside from a rant from Elaine re: the Stick.

ADDENDUM: I should point out that Elaine’s rant is based on Jeff Bell’s op-ed based on the now-retracted NASA Space Flight article.

Posted on April 16th, 2006 under Luddism. Comments Off