Falcon Heavy Announced
It’s pretty amazing what you can do (and how rapidly you can do it) when you’re not bogged down by ever-shifting customer desirements, stifling “best practices”, departmental fiefdoms, and rocket scientist Senators:
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Liberty Rocket
Oh brother. Somewhere in Huntsville, Mike Griffin is doing a happy-dance.
NASA hasn’t yet (so far as I know) made a decision on a launch vehicle for Orion, a decision one would expect to be pretty straightforward given the two options on hand. The continuing resolution is probably the main factor, but my inner cynic wonders if knowing this was in the works is some small part of the reason it’s taken so long.
The Free Frontier
Bill Whittle and Rand Simberg have an interesting video out on the “new space age” — you know, the one that started on July 21, 2004…
I’d quibble with a few of Whittle’s comments that relate to Orion, but other than that, it’s worth watching. It’s almost enough to make me run out and join a startup right now…
“In the Shadow of Ares” – Now Available!
“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.
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.
Congratulations to SpaceX
…on their second successful Falcon 9 launch and first commercial capsule orbit and reentry. Hopefully, SpaceX having now shown it can be done will encourage the other potential players to push on (and, perhaps, improve their chances of getting financing). Competition is a good thing.
Rand Simberg wonders whether this will change minds in DC. A lot of us in the office were pondering that same question today, though for a very different reason – namely, wondering whether the success of a commercial operation in doing what Orion won’t be able to do until mid-2013 will encourage Congress to take a knife to critical look at the rump Orion program.
Falcon 9 Maiden Launch Successful
UPDATE: added NASA’s coverage of the launch, from liftoff through (I’m guessing) max-Q.
Congratulations to SpaceX on a successful first launch of the Falcon 9. With any luck, they just drove a 180-foot-long aluminum stake through the heart of Ares-I. Heh.
It’s amusing, though, that a company founded by a dot-com millionaire can’t seem to get a webcast video to work properly. But I suppose there were other, more important concerns this morning.
Oddly enough, the launch was originally scheduled (the aborted attempt) at the same time as the biweekly all-hands teleconference with the LM Orion management team — otherwise known as the “everything is fine, don’t panic” meeting. I missed the first part of the meeting, but the portion I sat in on was dominated by voices sounding like relatives of Milton from “Office Space”, asking tediously detailed and irritatingly petulant questions about layoff notices, benefit rollovers, job transfers and other HR matters “for when the time comes”. A very strange juxtaposition.
One of the good things about the Falcon 9 success is that it will help still some of the critical voices speaking out against commercial crew and cargo, and newspace in general. Or if not still them, at least force them to find something else to complain about regarding newspace, much as successful missile defense intercepts forced critics who claimed it was physically impossible to pull off an intercept to find some other rationalization for their opposition. Had the launch failed, it would have been much more difficult to establish credibility for newspace — with this success, however, the industry can probably tolerate a few less than successful follow-on launches before losing the credibility established by SpaceX.
Bigelow Still in the Game, Backs Commercial Crew
Bigelow supports the new commercial-focused NASA manned-space policy. Not surprisingly, because it also helps their own business model — which, I think, is the best part of the new policy. Flights to ISS might pay the bills, but it’s the expansion into new areas of business independent of NASA that will make commercial crew services sustainable.
I just hope they don’t wait too long for a commercial provider to emerge. There’s scuttlebutt going around that they are working with multiple contenders to assure that they aren’t left without some means of getting to their station(s).
James Cameron’s 3D Mars Camera
If James Cameron is so passionate about restoring the 3D camera to MSL/Curiosity, then…instead of lobbying, and urging, and taking his concerns to the NASA administrator, why didn’t he just pay for it out of pocket?
I don’t know that he didn’t, or didn’t offer to do so (the article doesn’t say), but it seems like the obvious thing to do for a guy with a passion and a couple billion dollars in the bank. Indeed, a sponsorship arrangement with NASA would have been a coup for both. Trade Cameron the rights to market the resulting imagery in exchange for underwriting the camera, let him produce a theatrical 3D documentary using it, and both win: Cameron cleans up at the box office, and NASA gets a great PR and education/information outreach opportunity.
It’s The End Of the World As We Know It
Well, you would have thought so from some of the nailbiting hall talk and email at work today concerning the announcement that the Obama administration will push for the cancellation of Constellation, replacing it with initiatives aimed at bringing the nascent commercial spaceflight industry into bloom. The doom and gloom around Orion was in (understandable) contrast to the delight (or simple satisfaction) seen around the space blogosphere.
I think Michael Mealing comes closest to my own attitude towards this development:
President Obama’s new policy for NASA is the most fiscally conservative and downright capitalist policy to come along since the agency was founded.
And yes, it really boggles my mind that that should be the case. Obama? Capitalist? Who’da thunk? As one co-worker quipped today, Obama seems confused: he wants to nationalize a private industry in healthcare, but privatize the national program in manned space. One thing that has really surprised me today is how many of my friends have called or emailed me, expressing shock and disappointment that we are now “abandoning” space – unwittingly accepting the premise that a government program is our only possible means of getting people there. The perception that government is the sole entity capable of conducting manned spaceflight is so ingrained and unquestioned that it doesn’t seem to occur to even those who claim to be capitalists to question it.
But of course, I have to temper my surprise and excitement at this prospect, much as I did regarding the newfound enthusiasm for nuclear power Mr. Obama expressed in his SOTU last week. There’s going to be a lot of haggling to get the Congressional NASA caucus on board with this (although one Senator who could have been expected to be among the biggest roadblocks seems to be climbing on board – however reluctantly). It’s going to take some time, and who knows, just as ESAS made a dog’s breakfast of the VSE, so too could Congressional compromises and NASA resistance turn the promise of this new policy direction into yet another dead end.
At LOTR With PPC Watching POTUS Read the SOTU on the TOTUS
It was an acronym frenzy at Libery on the Rocks – DTC tonight. The PPC reportage was done by El Presidente, mostly via the People’s Press Twitter feed.
As with the big healthcare speech back in September (the occasion of the NPR incident), my commentary was delivered in the more transitory medium of live heckling of the teevee screen. This time around there wasn’t a neighboring table of kool-aid-guzzling Obama worshippers hissing and whining back at me, unfortunately, which took a bit of the fun out of it.
Apart from Fox’s amusing Drudge-like juxtapositions of lines from the speech with camera shots of topically-relevant politicians, there was only one thing that I liked about this SOTU: Mr. Obama’s promise to push for next-generation nuclear power in the U.S.. Of course, just like his promises to freeze (parts of) federal spending, expand government transparency, and usher in a new bipartisan civility, I realize that we are as likely to see any action on that promise as we are to see the National Mall host unicorn chariot races.
The rest of the speech was a nauseating stew of all-things-to-all-people statism and incongruous attempts to steal the fiscal responsibility and small government themes the Republicans are gearing up to campaign on in the fall, seasoned with the usual Democrat pathos and anger and garnished liberally with Mr. Obama’s trademark nose-high smugness. Noticeably absent yet again was any mention of NASA or space policy in general. “So what’s new?”, one might ask. Amid all the yammering about green energy trendy greenwashing scams and investment in taxpayer subsidization of (politcally sexy) science and technology, it’s still a little surprising that federal space policy didn’t merit a mention this time around, especially if the rumors are true that a change in that policy towards more climate monitoring (green!) and commercial services (jobs!) is imminent.
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A young girl sets out to prove herself by resolving a long-forgotten mystery. But when she gets close to the truth, what she thought was a harmless adventure becomes a threat to the future of the independent commercial settlements on Mars.
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