MarsBlog.net

Thanks to a cheap promotional airfare and some friends willing to go on a weekend trip to the Arctic north, in the winter, on a lark, I now know what Iceland looks like in the dark.

Something like this…

…which reminded me of the agricultural bubbles at the Green in In the Shadow of Ares.

In fact, they’re a set of agricultural greenhouses in the town of Hveragerði, and despite their size are each about a tenth as wide and about 1/15th as long as their fictional counterparts.

CLARIFICATION: No, we did not actually go to Iceland on a lark. We used an airplane.

Posted on January 26th, 2013 under In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Settlement, Useful Technology. Tags: Iceland, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Comments Off

A not particularly revelatory look at NASA’s ever-deferred humans-to-Mars efforts: The Deferred Dreams of Mars

Still worth a read, even if it is mostly a recitation of the conventional wisdom on the topic – not to be harsh on Brian Bergstein, it’s just that there’s nothing really new in what he has written. Apart from references to SpaceX as a synechdoche for the emerging private space industry, the substance of the article is little different from Bob Zubrin’s complaints about NASA’s lack of vision for Mars from 1996.

Funny, though, that there’s no mention of SLS in the article, but he does (in the SpaceX paragraph) repeat the conventional assumption that ginormous rockets would be required for manned missions to Mars. There is also no serious discussion of Mars settlement, only sortie missions, which I have to suspect comes from Bergstein interviewing mainly NASA employees.

Posted on October 27th, 2012 under Settlement, Space Commerce, Space Policy, Space Technology. Tags: Design Reference Mission, mars, nasa, zubrin. Comments: 2

That’s what George Landrith over at Big Government is calling SpaceX, which is amusing considering Musk’s involvement with Solar City — SpaceX: Solyndra in Space:

We now pay the Russians $65 million per seat to take our astronauts to and from the space station. And the Obama Administration’s unimaginative and amateurish vision for space exploration — even if successful — will not revive the dying program. It merely follows the disturbing pattern of the Solyndra scandal, funneling tax dollars to Obama donors and fundraisers.

So, it’s bad that we might pay the Russians $260M to send four U.S. astronauts to the space station on Soyuz each year, but it’s worse that we might pay three American contractors an average of up to $667M total per year (depending on milestone performance) to develop multiple new indigenous crew vehicles capable of launching up to seven astronauts to the ISS on each flight…presumably for a lower cost per seat, and with the added bonus of enabling follow-on commercial space development?

How is that like going against advice to give loan guarantees to a nearly-bankrupt politically-connected company producing an overpromised product with obvious problems at the basic physics level in a market glutted with competing products thanks to government-subsidized overproduction? Sure, Musk has been chummy with Obama on occasion (and his brother was one of the board members of the leftist Democracy Alliance that helped get Obama and other “progressives” elected since 2006), and donates to Obama (among others, including a GOP rising star), but one can’t seriously make the claim that Musk started SpaceX simply to milk the taxpayers of money being lavished on cronies via a government-stoked fad. SpaceX is solvent and predates the commercial crew-cargo program in question, and at no point has there been the same “popular delusions” mania around commercial space as around “green energy”…the sort of mania that drives the bubble of speculative schemes and crony scams we’ve been watching pop over the past year or so.

This bit is so short-sighted that Landrith must have left nose prints on his screen while writing it:

However, whether the space station will be in service in a decade is not clear. So we may be paying top dollar for the development of something we will never use. In the mean time, we continue to rely on Russia. Even if SpaceX can eventually safely carry astronauts to the space station, it will not constitute a serious space exploration program. The space station is in low-Earth orbit and we cannot explore space or even the moon if we cannot travel beyond low-Earth orbit.

“…the space station…”: George, meet Bob.

The shortsightedness here is a failure of imagination and a static view of the world in which all changes occur in isolation. A new invention will only be used for that for which it was originally invented, and won’t open up new opportunities and unexpected applications. How does he know that a product line of operational Dragon spacecraft won’t be used by NASA or others (civil, military, academic, or commercial) for a program of exploration? How does he know that someone (like…Musk?) won’t get an itch to go to the Moon or Mars, and use/modify/upgrade Dragon spacecraft accordingly? How does he know that with a commercial spacecraft fleet providing less expensive crew and cargo access to LEO that a market for other space stations or for other destinations or other applications of the technology won’t form? He doesn’t – he simply can’t imagine it happening.

And why would the three companies involved have an obligation to form a “space exploration program”, serious or otherwise? They don’t, any more than Bath Iron Works is obligated to implement a “serious ocean exploration program”. These companies are building transportation systems. Exploration is supposed to be what NASA is for, no?

The challenges of space exploration require a vastly different capability than SpaceX is trying to develop.

And the challenges of curing cancer require a vastly different capability than Ford is trying to develop…for cancer researchers to use in getting to and from work.

Cue the obligatory dollop of romantic “Golden Age” NASAtalgia and attendant fellation of the “Kennedy Vision” to which it seems even conservatives are not immune:

Since President John Kennedy energized the nation with the mission to put a man on the moon, NASA had always been about big ideas in space exploration, not politics. But this changed in 2010. NASA largely abandoned any serious goal to explore space when the White House directed NASA to concentrate on Earth-based projects like researching climate science which simply replicates the research being done by thousands of other institutions, universities and scientists. While NASA has a space exploration program on paper, its vision is unfocused and its funding is raided to support small-idea projects that are not worthy of NASA’s proud tradition.

Pining for a return to the days when nearly all activities in space were conducted under the technocratic auspices of a state bureau for space exploration doesn’t seem to jibe with a preference for free markets and limited government. Especially not when getting back to that “vision” would entail strangling in the crib the emerging commercial startups that would lead to a free market in space access and in-space activities, and thereby reduce the role of the state to those activities like basic science and pathfinding exploration to which it is arguably somewhat better suited.

While I’m with Landrith against duplicative global warming research (why is that not NOAA‘s domain?), the last time I checked it was one ‘big idea’ in space exploration, the Webb Space Telescope, which was hoovering up the money from other NASA projects.

NASA claims that these companies will “compete” with each other. But with only two trips per year to the space station scheduled over the next decade, it is unclear how these companies can profitably “compete.” This is what will likely happen — the taxpayer will provide massive funding to several companies to build the same thing and in the end there will not be enough work for the companies to compete over.

There is a limited manifest of flights to the ISS over the next decade because our ability to get crew to and from the ISS is limited at present to Soyuz, with its monopoly pricing and  political complications. A domestic option for crew rotations and cargo delivery at a lower cost than Soyuz would allow for utilization of the ISS at levels closer to what it was designed for (the full crew of six, plus visiting crew and maybe some space tourists; more and more-frequently-swapped experiments; etc.), and thus increase the market for commercial crew and cargo flights. And again, Landrith presumes that ISS is the only game in town – it may be that today, but given a commercial crew capability other destinations are already poised to enter the new market, and competition itself can drive new applications, activities, and markets by companies striving to stay afloat.

The real kicker is that if, and when, SpaceX’s development is complete, NASA will not own the technology, SpaceX will own it.

It depends. Based on prior experience, I’d expect new technology developed by CCiCap participants would be covered by agreements between NASA and the companies regarding IR&D spending and proprietary information. If a company spends exclusively internal funds developing a particular bit of technology, they retain ownership. If NASA pays for some or all of it, NASA has certain rights to it.

For example, when purchasing manned flight to the moon, designing the space shuttle, or a high-tech supersonic stealth fighter jet, the marketplace doesn’t have completed products sitting on a store shelf or in a warehouse waiting to be purchased. In these cases, we have a highly developed set of government contracting rules that require accountability and transparency and which are designed to ensure that the government achieves the desired results in a timely fashion and at a reasonable cost. That is how we got to the moon, and built the shuttle, the space station, and most of our world-leading high-tech military technology.

We got to the Moon on time, but via a fiscally unsustainable program whose firm deadline imposed high costs in money and lives.

The Space Shuttle entered service three years late and 30% over its initial cost estimate (and that’s not even considering the awful design compromises needed to keep the overrun on development costs that small, which in turn made the lifetime operational costs signficantly higher).

The Space Station was notoriously over-budget, to the point that vital elements like the Crew Return Vehicle (whose predecessor is the basis of what Sierra Nevada is building as part of CCiCap…), the habitation module, and the TransHab (whose technology Bigelow Aerospace licensed and improved upon for their future commercial space stations…) were cancelled to contain ballooning costs. It’s hard to find good numbers at the ready, but if this is any guide, the initial cost estimate was around $8B, and the final cost at the completion of construction was around $35B (excluding Shuttle costs).

As for high-tech military technology, many major new military procurement programs of late seem to have ended up behind schedule and/or over budget during development: F-22, F-35, DD-21, LCS, SBIRS, FIA, MUOS, GMD, V-22, RAH-66, E-I-E-I-O…

SpaceX collects tax dollars so that it can learn how to build and develop something that other companies were doing a generation ago.

I’m not aware any companies were sending people and cargo into space on a commercial basis a generation ago. Having been a space nerd since about 1972, I’m surprised I would have missed something like that.

It is curious that SpaceX is now receiving so much taxpayer cash given its stunningly thin record of success in space.

I hear this complaint every time SpaceX accomplishes something. If launching a commercial EELV-class rocket successfully the first time, following it up by successfully launching and recovering the first commercial space capsule, and following that up by successfully rendezvousing and berthing a commercial capsule to a space station for the first time, from scratch, all in under ten years of existence as a company, while using far fewer people and far less money than comparable government-led efforts of the past is a “thin record of success in space”, I’m curious to know what real success looks like.

And it is even more troubling given that SpaceX’s founder and CEO is a big-time Obama donor. This is starting to sound like another Solyndra where friends of the administration get unsustainable sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense.

No, what this sounds like is someone allowing his distaste for the Obama administration to poison his opinion of a third party through guilt by association.

However, the problem with how the Obama Administration is pursuing its uninspiring and unimaginative space program goals…

…which include (mirable dictu) a program to jumpstart a commercial industry in crew and cargo delivery…

…goes well beyond picking donors to receive favorable contracts and guaranteed government cash with little accountability.

Boeing received a bit over 4% more from CCiCap than SpaceX. Are they corrupt and unaccountable crony capitalists in bed with Obama, too? Are they ~4% more corrupt than SpaceX, or is the difference in corruption in the noise at that level?

And how do “fixed price, pay-for-performance milestones” square with “guaranteed government cash” and “little accountability”?

Even if SpaceX accomplishes everything asked of it, it will not get us beyond low-Earth orbit.

Musk claims Dragon is being designed to do just that despite not having been asked to, and Falcon 9 is GTO capable…something which, to judge by the company’s launch manifest, has been asked of it. Not sure who “us” is, but SpaceX will get its paying customers beyond low-Earth orbit, as asked of it, and deliver a spacecraft capable of more than has been asked of it to-date. Assertion: FAIL.

Simply stated, the Obama administration’s vision for space exploration is essentially to replace the hauling capability of the shuttle — something that was developed more than 30 years ago.

With CCiCap, perhaps so. But that’s a little like saying Boeing’s vision for the 787 is merely to replace the passenger capability of the 757: it ignores the motivations for doing so and the means employed in the effort. There’s also a no duh element to his complaint whose utter banality I don’t think Landrith in his blue-faced demand for a space pony quite appreciates: the program is replacing the hauling capability of the Shuttle (for crew in particular) because we no longer have the Shuttle to haul anything with.

Okay, the space pony thing is unfair. Landrith doesn’t anywhere say he wants a space pony. Unfortunately, he doesn’t anywhere say what he does want. Which makes his rant rather impotent, don’t you think?

Beyond that, real space exploration is not a serious priority.

Good. It’s about damned time. The priority now (at least with CCiCap) is space commercialization. You know, like capitalism? And if we play our cards right, it could be the start of space settlement. I personally have had enough “real space exploration” to last me a lifetime. It’s long past time to start actually accomplishing something more than sending a few scientists a year into space to dink around with exotic materials and biology experiments.

Posted on August 25th, 2012 under Economics, politics, Settlement, Space Commerce, Space Policy. Tags: Big Government, bigelow, Boeing, Breitbart, CCDEV, CCiCap, CST-100, dragon, Dreamchaser, fisking, George Landrith, nasa, Sierra Nevada, spacex, TransHab. Comments: 5

I’m doing some reading in Indian history as part of my research for the sequel to In the Shadow of Ares. In John Keay’s India: A History, I came across this interesting passage in his discussion of the ‘epic age’ of the Mahabharata and Ramayana:

As for the retreat into exile, the other central theme in both epics, this is taken to indicate the process by which clan society resolved its conflicts and at the same time encroached ever deeper into the subcontinent. Eventually population pressures on land and other resources would encourage greater social specialisation and he assertion of a central authority, two of the prerequisites of a state. But during the first centuries of the first millennium BC, these same pressures seem merely to have encouraged a traditional solution whereby clans segmented and split away to explore new territories. [emphasis added]

In the context of the chapter, he is taking a common thread of the two epics (the exile in the wilderness of their respective protagonists) as a hint as to how the ?r?an colonists gradually spread to the east and south from the Indus Valley.

What struck me as interesting is that much the same thing could happen with space settlement, especially given some TBD mode of practical interstellar travel.

In the near term (say, the next 100 years), if efforts to commercialize space access pan out and we begin building colonies in space, on the Moon, and on Mars, we will have established a new “wilderness” in the sense Keay describes elsewhere in the chapter: an untamed space where danger may lurk away from the safety of established civilization, but where the freedom exists to build afresh. The process of settlement and ongoing development will due to resource and labor shortages limit the degree to which a central authority can be asserted, providing a breathing space for innovation between the continuously expanding frontier and the expanding boundary of civilization trailing behind it. Political or social conflicts unresolvable in the civilized regions can be defused through one or another party choosing to escape to the freedom of this breathing space or the wilderness beyond, thereby pushing the frontier further outward — versus being kept bottled up in a finite arena where the intractability of the disagreements and the inescapable proximity of the conflicting parties can foster discontent, unrest, and violence lasting generations.

In practice, this might mean expanding to lunar colonies as near-Earth orbital habitats become too regulated or restricted by Earth governments or international treaties. On the Moon, disaffected individuals or groups frustrated with their circumstances in an existing settlement might decide to start their own settlements on or beyond the fringes of areas already settled or explored. As the lunar frontier ‘closes’ due to Keay’s “social specialization and assertion of central authority”, similarly frustrated settlers might decide to try their fortunes on the martian frontier, then among the asteroids, and so on through increasingly less-desirable properties.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened already, in our own history. The story of the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims, the Mormon migrations to Utah, and the “Go west, young man” ethos of the Old West were clearly manifestations of this same concept.

In the longer term, given some means of practical interstellar travel, this process of expansion-by-exile into the wilderness could happen on a vastly larger scale. If this turns out to be true, the ‘wilderness’ becomes effectively infinite.

Of course, this depends on a conservative view that we will continue to be recognizably human over such long time scales, as the development of new frontiers will likely result in an acceleration of technological innovation – including ‘transhuman’ technology like cognitive enhancements, targeted genetic improvements, or even ‘uploading’ into non-biological (or who knows, even non-physical) forms. What makes the expansion-by-exile concept useful for science fiction is that it can avoid the trap of having to tell a story from the difficult-to-conceive perspective of these transhumans by giving an author the choice among worlds on a spectrum of development — after all, given the Amish as a present-day example, it’s not difficult to imagine that some of those irreconcilable differences that might drive settlers into exile in the wilderness would concern the adoption of certain transhuman technologies, resulting in worlds (whether at the center or the periphery of civilization) whose inhabitants are still relatably human.

Posted on January 20th, 2012 under In the Shadow of Ares, Indian Space, Science Fiction, Settlement, Writing. Comments Off

This could certainly be useful in martian and lunar settlements, and perhaps moreso on the way to and from them – Researchers successfully treat previously lethal doses of radiation:

“The fact that this treatment can be administered up to a day after radiation exposure is so important,” said Millie Donlon, DARPA’s program manager for this effort. “This is because most of the existing treatments we have require they be administered within hours of exposure to potentially lethal radiation – something that might not always be possible in the confusion that would likely follow such an exposure event.”

The treatment – a combination of two readily-available and stockpileable pharmaceuticals – increases in mice the survival rate from a normally lethal dose to 80%, and there are indications it could be even more effective in humans. Note that it appears to treat only the immediate effects (“radiation sickness”) and there’s no mention of whether it reduces rates of long-term medical problems stemming from the exposure, such as cancers. Of course, one mustn’t be too greedy — I’m sure someone exposed to a lethal dose of radiation would consider the potential for cancer later in life an okay tradeoff to not dying a rapid and horrible death.

What might come of this discovery, if it does work as indicated?

• Long-term space activities outside LEO (including transportation to and from deep space destinations) might be perceived as less risky if solar flares or other high-exposure events are less of a problem;
• Spacecraft, stations, and surface facilities could be made simpler and lighter – if it’s accurate to consider this treatment as effectively raising the lethal dose (and again ignoring the long-term consequences in favor of short-term survival), structural countermeasures for extreme events don’t need to block quite as much radiation, and lighter or larger “storm cellars” become possible;
• Nuclear power accidents become less hysteria-inducing (but then so might nuclear weapons use – c.f. Michael F. Flynn’s The Washer at the Ford)

Interesting.

Apparently, Resveratrol also has some anti-rad properties.

Posted on January 7th, 2012 under Science & Engineering, Settlement, Space Technology, Useful Technology. Tags: cancer, medicine, radiation, treatment. Comments Off

An interesting project at the South Pole, involving agriculture in a controlled (and in this case, sunless and soil-less) environment: To the moon…South Pole greenhouse model for growing freshies on other worlds

Crops of lettuce, kale, cucumber, peppers, herbs, tomatoes, cantaloupes and edible flowers comprise many of the plants grown in the climate-controlled chamber. Because the importation of soil is restricted by the Antarctic Treaty , dirt is not used to grow the plants. In fact, the closest local dirt is nearly two miles beneath the ice on which the station sits. The plants are grown in a hydroponic nutrient solution instead — no dirt needed.

For that matter, no sunlight is needed either. The growth chamber, which was built in the winter of 2004, makes its own light via 13 water-cooled, high-pressure sodium lamps. In this bright environment, it is not uncommon to find people, like the plants, dwelling happily under the intense light produced in the chamber during the dark polar winter.

Carl and I put a lot of thought into extraterrestrial agriculture while writing In the Shadow of Ares, not least because the primary setting for the book is a very large agricultural settlement. Interestingly (or perhaps not surprisingly), we came to some of the same conclusions as these researchers. Of particular note, the morale benefit to settlers in an inescapably indoor environment of having an open green space (or Greenspace, if you’ve read the book).

Posted on March 11th, 2011 under In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Settlement, Space Technology, Useful Technology, Writing. Tags: agriculture, antarctica, Economics, food, In the Shadow of Ares, mars, moon, Settlement. Comments Off

“In the Shadow of Ares” (formerly known around here as “Labyrinth of Night”) is now available for download at Amazon.com:

In 2029, the third exploration mission to Mars vanishes without a trace. Two decades later, the success of human settlement of Mars and the life of a young girl hinge on the secret of what happened to the Ares III mission.

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Twenty years later, Mars is a growing outpost of humanity, and 14-year-old settler Amber Jacobsen is a minor interplanetary celebrity – ‘the First Kid on Mars’.  Pioneering Mars is hard, unglamorous work, though, and Amber secretly wishes she were just an ordinary girl living on Earth.

When her family’s homestead is destroyed in an apparent accident, the Jacobsens relocate to an independent settlement located on the northern fringes of Noctis Labyrinthus, a vast and largely unexplored canyonland.  Their new home promises new opportunities, and Amber looks forward to being just another member of the community. Instead, the other settlers dismiss her as a burdensome child and refuse to accept her as the responsible young adult she has become.

In order to prove the value of her unique knowledge and perspective, Amber vows to uncover the fate of the Ares III mission, whose loss had largely been forgotten in the rush of the Martian settlement boom.  But this seemingly harmless challenge thrusts her into a deadly conflict: those who know the truth will kill to keep it hidden, while those who destroyed her family’s homestead would use the secret to secure their dominance over all of Mars.

In solving the mystery, Amber could destroy everything the Martian settlers have worked to create.

It’s priced at an affordable $6.99, and would make a wonderful Christmas present for the science fiction reader or young adult on your shopping list. Especially if you’re buying them a Kindle or they already own one (remember, you can also download the free Kindle app for various electronic platforms if you/they don’t have a Kindle reader).

While I’m going to be occupied for much of the weekend with writing a business plan and attending Christmas parties, I do expect to get the blog at AresProject.com up and running again in the next few days. We will use that forum to discuss the book, the backstory, etc.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 under Economics, Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, politics, Science Fiction, Settlement, Space Commerce, Writing. Tags: Amber Jacobsen, Ares Project, ebook, In the Shadow of Ares, In the Shadow of Ares, kindle. Comments: 7

The University of Arizona has posted an interesting new batch of images from HiRISE, taken between July 8-31 this year. Wired, in its writeup on the Mars image collection, includes a sample image that looks sorta…familiar…

These volcanic cones were formed by hot lava running over water or ice. The heat from the lava boiled the water underneath, and the water burst upwards in an exploding bubble of lava. The explosion threw chunks of molten and solid lava into the air to gather into the cones. These cones are similar in size and shape to cones found in Iceland.

Probably because last month I saw some of the craters in Iceland referred to in the Wired article:

It’s a little hard to appreciate them from this angle – short of renting a plane or climbing the Gibraltar-like pinnacle in the middle of the lake, there wasn’t a good vantage point from which to capture on film the features you could see with your eyes (well, okay, there sorta was, but I didn’t have my long zoom lens on the trip).

As I recall, the Mars Society was at one time considering establishing one of their analogue stations in Iceland. One could certainly choose far less Mars-similar locations…

[via Instapundit]

Posted on September 3rd, 2010 under Settlement, Space Science. Tags: HiRISE, Iceland, mars, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MRO, wired. Comments Off

The clouds and greenery (such as it is) distract from the impression here, but the geothermal taps at Krafla struck me as looking a lot like the infrastructure one might expect to see near a settlement on the Moon or Mars. The offworld resemblance wasn’t only in the incompletely-terraformed appearance of the landscape.

Posted on August 26th, 2010 under Entertainment, Settlement, Space Technology. Tags: Iceland, industry, Krafla, mars, moon, Science Fiction, Settlement. Comments Off