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Rand has been liveblogging this weekend’s Space Access Conference…too many posts to link, just go here and work your way up.

Fascinating information — makes me wish I’d been there myself.

What caught my attention was the recurring tone of resurgent anger and disdain coming through as regards NASA — the agency generally and Constellation in particular. The honeymoon regarding the VSE is finally over, and the consensus appears to be that the whole effort is irremediably botched.

Which may indeed be the case (Thanks, Mike! Hope Ares I was worth it!). But really, did anyone who has watched NASA over the past twenty years really expect any different? It’s the nature of the beast (and working on Orion while knowing this is, admittedly, the triumph of hope over experience).

However…

It made me chuckle to catch this whiff of resentment in the midst of so much reporting on so many different emerging alternatives to NASA. Maybe it’s just me, but given these alternatives perhaps the right attitude towards Constellation’s inevitable implosion should be indifference…or perhaps impatience towards getting it over with so the new space companies can pick up the pieces.

From my own perspective, it’s win-win. Either the project I’m part of right now succeeds, or it fails and I take the (useable) knowledge and experience gained from it to one of the many new companies aiming to shove NASA aside. It’s nice to know that if Orion gets cancelled (or completed, for that matter), there’ll be other appealing alternatives waiting.

Posted on March 24th, 2007 under Space Commerce. Comments: 1

While traveling this past week, I was finally able to get into reading Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, which has been sitting forlorn on my book pile for four years. Immediately, I discovered something of relevance to space tourism — an extended discussion on what are nowadays called “early adopters”, which answers well those who deride space tourism as a frivolous hobby of the rich:

[T]he new things will often become available to the greater part of the people only because for some time they have been the luxuries of the few…A large part of the expenditure of the rich, though not intended for that end, thus serves to defray the cost of the experimentation with the new things that, as a result, can later be made available to the poor…What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and even undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually be available to many. The range of what will be tried and later developed, the fund of experience that will become available to all, is greatly extended by the unequal distrubution of present benefits; and the rate of advance will be greatly increased if the first steps are taken long before the majority can profit from them. Many of the improvements would indeed never become a possibility for all if they had not long before been available to some. If all had to wait for better things until they could be provided for all, that day would in many instances never come. Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality.

Hard to believe that an economics treatise from 1960 could have such relevance to a topic like space tourism. What I’m more interested in in reading Constitution of Liberty, however, are the implications for space settlement and the extension of Western liberty and its attendant concepts into new realms. And early on, in a discussion on liberty’s value in addressing change, he has this to say:

The undesigned novelties that constantly emerge in the process of adaptation [to changing circumstances] will consist, first, of new arrangements or patterns in which the efforts of different individuals are coordinated and of new constellations in the use of resources, which will be in their nature as temporary as the particular conditions that have evoked them. There will be, second, modifications of tools and institutions adapted to the new circumstances. Some of these will also be merely temporary adaptations to the conditions of the moment, while others will be improvements that increase the versatility of the existing tools and usages and will therefore be retained. These latter will constitute a better adaptation not merely to the particular circumstances of time and place but to some permanent feature of our environment.

In other words, the process of adapting to new conditions brings about new ways and new institutions through a process of evolution, outcomes which (as he elaborates on elsewhere) would be unlikely to result from a process of deliberate, anticipatory planning.

This is why it is hard for me to take seriously conventions or treaties or other efforts which aim to establish detailed international “regimes” by which space resources may be used and ownership claimed. Establishing elaborate regimes in advance of settlement essentially precludes free experimentation with alternatives which may prove superior, and which through competition and selection would tailor themselves to the conditions actually experienced in the field. In practice, even the preordained regimes governing resources, property rights, and other aspects of space settlement would have to evolve eventually, but how much time and effort would be spent unneccessarily in the process before the needed reforms in ill-considered (but lovingly planned-out) institutions were finally brought about? All because a few idealists prefer to engineer a brave new world from scratch to the time-honored practice of extending existing institutions to the new frontier and letting them evolve and adapt as needed. Predictably, Hayek has something to say about that as well:

Those who believe that all useful institutions are deliberate contrivances and who cannot conceive of anything serving a human purpose that has not been consciously designed are almost of necessity enemies of freedom. For them, freedom means chaos.

Should be interesting to see what the remaining 340 pages of tortured but fascinating prose have to say.

Posted on March 24th, 2007 under Space Policy. Comments: 2

Looks like SpaceX finally got something off the ground…or rather, more than just a couple hundred feet off the ground this time: A night of high drama for SpaceX success.

But perhaps Elon didn’t get a good look at the video of the staging before appearing at the press Q&A:

‘Stage separation went very well,’ he added, dismissing what may have been observed on the video. ‘Both the stage separation and the fairing sep went flawlessly. Second stage ignition also went flawlessly.’

Umm…I don’t think I would judge that to be quite a ‘flawless’ staging. If that staging were ‘flawless’, we wouldn’t have bothered to do all the work we did on CEV to assure the SM could extract from the spacecraft adapter without the orbital maneuvering engine striking anything on the way out.

It is of course hard to know without being familiar with the design of SpaceX’s second stage engine, but it sure looks like there was a crack in the bell about halfway down, roughly in the area where the engine struck the interstage during staging. If it was a crack, it’s a lucky thing that it didn’t burn through (to be fair, it didn’t appear to be in any danger of doing so, appearing as a dark squiggle across the red-hot bell…it was the areas closer to the throat with their yellow- to white-hot blotches that appearerd likely to burn through at any moment).

Posted on March 22nd, 2007 under Space Commerce. Comments: 1

One of the fun things about working on manned space projects is that you get to get up close to interesting flight hardware.

For example, my first day on the job with LM I was given a thorough tour of the Shuttle external tank production line…and for the next six-plus years had anytime access to visit the giant parts that go into it and the giant tools which assemble them (in addition to actually working with said parts and tooling for the better part of a year). A few months later, while working in Palmdale, I got an up-close tour of Atlantis while it was in the depot for an overhaul. And then there was that unauthorized tour of KSC a couple of years ago…

Working on “Apollo on steroids” has now borne its own fruit: while in Houston on Tuesday, a bunch of us got a quite thorough tour of America, the CM used on Apollo 17. Very educational. Photographs, plans, and Virtual Apollo can only show you so much, after all, so it was a great opportunity to see the real thing. It was also interesting to see it with different eyes this time around, since I’ve learned a lot more about the design details of the CM since the last time I saw one two years ago…it’s surprising how much more you see when you know what it is you’re looking at.

The forward compartment, with the drogue mortars, pitch-down thrusters, retrieval loop, and “flowerpot” visible in front of the docking tunnel.

I’d sat in (what was described as) a trainer at the museum in Huntsville several years ago, so I knew going in how small the interior was. The real thing, however, it didn’t seem quite as tight, and certainly nowhere near as claustrophobic as I remembered. It was exceedingly difficult to sit up from the center couch, though, due to my height and the lack of clearance to the instrument panel, and it was uncomfortable to lie back on the couch as well (the headrest dug into my shoulders). I think I could manage a trip to the moon in that small of a volume, particularly with free fall to make it easier to get around in the tight confines, but only so long as I didn’t have to share it with two other people.

Not surprisingly, it smelled like old electromechanical equipment inside — machine oil and ozone.

Window 1 (Commander’s window).

The only unfortunate part (aside from having to share time with a dozen other people), was that the only part of the vehicle we didn’t have access to was the part whose Orion equivalent is my responsibility: the aft equipment bay and all the space under the backshell and heatshield. But then, NASA was being gracious in letting us examine America so intimately as it was…I think I would have been pushing my luck to ask them to start pulling off the TPS for me.

Roll thrusters

But the best thing about seeing it up close was that it was Apollo 17 which triggered my interest in space as a child. My grandmother sat me down in front of the television one day and told me to watch what was happening, and that it was something “historical” that I should remember: it was the splashdown of Apollo 17 on its return from the moon.

I took roughly 130 pictures while there, but unfortunately I left the CD with all the really interesting ones in the office this afternoon…those will have to wait until tomorrow.

Posted on March 22nd, 2007 under Meta. Comments Off