400 Seconds with the SRBs
This is one of the coolest space videos I have ever seen:
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Synthetic Meat – Coming Soon to a Burger Joint Near You?
Well, maybe not all that soon – they’re predicting 10-20 years, which would fit nicely with our timeline for In the Shadow of Ares: Scientists Prepare Test-Tube Burger
Starting with bovine stem cells, the Dutch researchers have grown muscle fibres up to 3cm long and 0.5mm thick. The fibres are tethered and exercised as they grow, like real muscles, by bending and stretching in the culture dishes. They feed on a broth of vegetable proteins and other nutrients, equivalent to the grass or grain diet of cattle.
At present the fibres are a pallid yellowish-pink colour, rather than the red of raw ground beef, because they do not contain blood, but Prof Post plans to improve their appearance.
Hopefully not by adding a bunch of dye to it.
The comments on the linked article are disappointingly luddite (and predictably smug and preachy in the case of the vegetarians/vegans), but they did prompt me to wonder just how “natural” such synthetic meats might end up being. It’s a fair point that if you’re eating all the hormones and such required to grow the meat in vitro, it’s probably going to be less healthy for you than the real thing.
Promising Radiation-Exposure Treatments
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.
USAF Reusable Booster Contract Awarded
…to Lockheed Martin. Saw this in the company news clippings today – Lockheed Martin Selected By U.S. Air Force for Reusable Booster System Flight Demonstrator Program:
Lockheed Martin [NYSE:LMT] has been selected by the U.S. Air Force for a contract award to support the Reusable Booster System (RBS) Flight and Ground Experiments program. The value of the first task order is $2 million, with a contract ordering value of up to $250 million over the five-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract period. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center are developing the RBS as the next generation launch vehicle that will significantly improve the affordability, operability, and responsiveness of future spacelift capabilities over current expendable launchers.
Initial RBS Flight and Ground Experiments task orders will provide for an RBS flight demonstration vehicle called RBS Pathfinder scheduled to launch in 2015. The RBS Pathfinder is an innovative reusable, winged, rocket-powered flight test vehicle that will demonstrate the Reusable Booster Systems’ “rocketback” maneuver capabilities and validate the system requirements that will drive refinements in the design of the operational RBS.
I have no knowledge of this program, but whether it’s a first stage or even just a strap-on akin to what was proposed numerous times to replace the Shuttle’s SRBs, it’s one promising step towards increased reusability, and thus affordable access to space.
Hmm…sorta makes one wonder why USAF is doing this and not NASA…
ADDED: the concept picture here suggests that it isn’t a first stage. Which makes sense: start with a small vehicle as a replacement for (say) EELV strap-ons, work out the kinks, and then progress to larger and more complex versions.
Another Dead Russian Mars Probe
Maybe the Russians should just cut their losses and focus on another planet or the Moon – ESA Abandons Effort To Contact Russia’s Stranded Mars Probe:
NASA had also lent its tracking assets to the Phobos-Grunt salvage effort but was unable to pick up any signals from the spacecraft, which was launched Nov. 8 on a mission intended to land on the martian moon Phobos and return samples to Earth. The spacecraft also carries a small Chinese satellite intended for Mars orbit.
“The mission is no longer feasible,” said Manfred Warhaut, head of operations at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. In a conference call with journalists, Warhaut and ESOC operations engineer Wolfgang Hell, who had been in regular contact with Lavochkin, said Russia is unlikely to give up on Phobos-Grunt.
“We are not in a position to continue, but they definitely will not give up,” Warhaut said. “They will continue to try to send thruster commands” to get Phobos-Grunt’s engines to function.
It seems the more ambitious their Mars missions, the more quickly they fail. Which is too bad – the more Mars missions, the better, but also because the Phobos sample return on this mission would have been really interesting.
Nuclear Propulsion Research Revival?
One can only hope – Marshall Eyes In-Space Nuclear Propulsion:
During the Constellation years, Marshall worked with the Department of Energy on nuclear-power technology that might one day power a lunar outpost. While Los Alamos and other national labs handled the radioactive material, NASA experts here used heating elements to simulate nuclear fuel and concentrated on the power systems that would generate electricity on the Moon.
That work continues, but it has expanded to encompass another technology goal under the new Obama policy: advanced in-space propulsion. In a nondescript high-bay building, the power-plant team has installed a nuclear-thermal rocket environmental simulator, which flows gaseous hydrogen over heating elements that mimic different nuclear-fuel configurations. The idea is to test the way different materials react with the hydrogen at high temperature and pressure.
Unfortunately, given the mindless apocalyptic hysteria that greets any use of nuclear materials in space nowadays (such as fretting about the MSL rover being a potential “Fukushima in space”…no, really…someone actually wrote that…), it probably won’t be possible to build and use in-space nuclear propulsion until it can actually be done in-space.
I haven’t looked into the abundance of uranium on the moon, but I’m guessing that even if it were as abundant and accessable there as on Earth it would be a while before there is a suitable industrial base to support this use…
(Note that the accompanying photo is not of Marshall but of Michoud, which to my knowledge has no connection to nuclear propulsion programs.)
Blue Origin Gains Some Useful Experience
…by crashing a test vehicle – Successful Short Hop, Set Back, and Next Vehicle:
Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission, and then last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.
Nobody wants to lose a test vehicle, of course, but this can actually be a useful development — as anyone who has read Henry Petroski’s books understands, you learn more from your failures than from your successes. It has always struck me as the wrong approach that Orion didn’t budget and schedule a bunch of simple test vehicles, with potential failures and learning from them in mind. Yes there are test vehicles, but they’re each quite complex and expensive, and the failure of any one of them will be seen as a major black eye to the whole program (regardless of what might be learned).
Fortunately, given Bezos’ ability to fund the project, NASA getting cold feet over COTS or CCDEV after a failure probably isn’t much of a threat to the ongoing efforts he mentions in the post.
Falcon Test Launch (No, The *Other* Falcon)
DARPA will be launching a test flight of the Falcon HTV-2 hypersonic vehicle:
If all goes to plan, engineers will launch the Falcon HTV-2 to the edge of space, before detaching the plane and guiding it on a hypersonic flight that will reach speeds of 13,000mph (about 20 times the speed of sound) on its return to Earth.
Those who think that the long-overdue termination of the Space Shuttle and NASA/Congress’ lack of clear vision on what should replace it indicate the U.S. no longer has what it takes to innovate in aerospace ought look at this (and the X-37b) before shedding additional tears or rending further garments. DARPA and USAF certainly seem to be cutting new edges — and that’s on top of the New Space companies who are recapitulating and improving upon prior efforts with new technology of their own.
Collision Avoidance
Glenn Reynolds posts a bit about 2005 YU55, a 1300ft asteroid scheduled to pass within the orbital radius of the Moon this coming November. Observes Reynolds in response to a reader comment about “doing something”:
Yes, “Spacewatch” is about noticing this kind of thing. Doing something about it is someone else’s problem, alas. Maybe once the Falcon Heavy is flying . . .
Hmm… Falcon Heavy…with a LEO payload of 120,000lbs, and a core diameter of 3.66m and a fairing diameter of 5.2m.
I can think of a potentially useful payload in the 60,000lb range with a diameter of a mere 2.1m…
Feeding Martians
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).
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