News and Commentary on Space
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.
…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.
It baffles me why we need capsules when the Air Force and Boeing can do this.
Perhaps Rand is right – space isn’t important. Even to Lockheed Martin, a somewhat large player in the space biz, if our Flickr site is anything to go by.
Ten (old) pictures, three of which are nearly-three-year-old renderings of Orion, and none of which are of the External Tank, despite these being two of Space Systems’ most recognizable products. (There is even one picture of Atlas V, which is technically no longer an LM product.)
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of pictures of aircraft and other assorted defense items. One would think the PR squad could squeeze in at least one pic of the Orion ground test article, just to show the public that some progress is being made on the program.
I’ve always thought that NASA’s manned rover concepts were a little too consciously “futuristic”, designed more with a sci-fi aesthetic in mind than simple rugged practicality.
Now this…this is my idea of a manned rover…
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.
This sounds a lot more intriguing than it probably is:
US military’s top secret X-37B shuttle ‘disappears’ for two weeks, changes orbit
Since then, the X-37B been arguably the least-secret secret project on the planet, as fellow backyard astronomers joined in the scrutiny, aided by how-to video guides and apps such as the Simple Satellite Tracker.
That is, they did until July 29, when the shuttle disappeared, causing all kinds of consternation and conspiracy theories about its fate.
It took amateur skywatcher Greg Roberts of Cape Town, South Africa, who noticed that it failed to appear as scheduled above his base on August 14, another five days to find it.
When he did, he noticed it was some 30km higher and on a different trajectory, according to calculations from other colleagues in Rome and Oklahoma.
The X-37B’s new track means it takes six days to pass the same spot on Earth, as opposed to its original four-day track.
So it can maneuver, which is interesting but not unexpected. The hype, though, made me think of an old short story from Analog, Jerry Oltion’s “The Getaway Special”
A certified Mad Scientist invents a hyperdrive which can be built out of spare parts and can instantaneously teleport an arbitrary spherical volume of space and all it contains into a vacuum…
Because he’s immensely rich from having invented the perfect battery, he hires space on a Space Shuttle to test his drive – in a Getaway Special shuttle experiment canister – and tests it by taking the shuttle and crew on an unanticipated jaunt.
Heh. If only.
Finally getting the time to post more of my Iceland pictures on Flickr. Aside from the clouds and the sparse moss, one could picture a vista like this on Mars:
As I upload the pictures, I’m also adding any especially un-Earth-like shots to a separate set which I will publish here later. The set will include some shots I got of various geothermal installations, which (like the landscapes) look an awful lot like what I would expect some of the industrial parts of a Mars settlement to look like.
Looks like someone’s got both Orion and Dragon beat…
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.
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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.
