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INTERESTING COMMERCIALIZATION STEP: Space, Inc. And NASA’s Role
Under the 1998 Space Commercialization Act, NASA is required by law to purchase remote sensing data from commercial sources if that data meets the agency’s needs. This article describes how commercial data sources are evaluated in that regard.
One wonders why the agency doesn’t pursue a similar line with humans in space. Sure, it would take more than a couple of years for the industry to react and provide competetive options, but there’s no reason it couldn’t do so if given a nudge in that direction. For example, instead of designing and building the OSP as the next manned spacecraft, why not state up front that it will no longer build or operate manned spacecraft on its own, lay out a set of (attainable) requirements that a commercial vehicle must meet, and (with the consent and commitment of Congress) guarantee a certain minimum number of flights to be purchased in the future?
I’m certainly not suggesting anything new — this is just the “Air Mail” strategy that many others have discussed. It’s disappointing to see NASA successfully implement a strategy like this on small-potato programs, but plow right ahead with the same old buy-it-and-fly-it approach that’s worked so poorly for them — and us — in the past when it comes to manned spacecraft.
AGAIN? Launch of Boeing’s Delta-IV rocket delayed due to technical glitch.
Someone please tell me again why Boeing’s EELV gets all the press adulation…when it has yet to fly, and is so plagued with glitches that it’s now holding up Shuttle launches?
As with ISS, so too with Delta IV.
Update: Whoops, I need to check the date on an article before I rant about its content. Apparently, though launch was scrubbed Saturday, which I already knew, it is still on for Tuesday night (in other words, this isn’t an additional glitch).
LAMS/HOUSTON M.S. JOINT APPEARANCE: LAMS will be putting on a public outreach event tomorrow, Sunday November 17, at the Lafayette Natural History Museum, in Lafayette, LA.
The museum is located at 433 Jefferson Street, and we will be there from 11am.
NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE: Hidden Face of Mars Uncovered by Father & Daughter.
What they’ve discovered is concealed evidence of a geological era on Mars even earlier than the Noachian, as suggested by crater features buried under billions of years of dust and debris accumulation and not immediately visible in images of the planet. By shifting scales and false-color spectra on altimeter data, they located fine-scale variations in terrain that indicate subsurface structures buried under thick layers of later material.
Of course, they do point out that there is no way to tell exactly how old the features are, as the dating of geological eras on Mars is at this point just guesswork. One more reason to go there and find out, eh?
NASA SOLICITS PROPULSION PROPOSALS: NASA Calls On Industry, Academia For In-Space Propulsion Innovations. Well, this is potential good news for Mars exploration — anything that gets us there faster, cheaper, and with larger useful payloads is an especially welcome innovation when it comes to human missions and settlement.
“It’s not our intent to develop flight hardware geared exclusively to one-shot missions,” Johnson said. “Instead, we are working to develop cost-effective propulsion technologies that will support multiple missions, enabling us to send spacecraft on longer, more useful voyages — and in many cases to destinations that were previously unreachable using traditional propulsion systems.”
Even with robotic missions, this sort of thing makes a whole lot of sense. Designing and building one-off or two-off probes from scratch each time provides a whole lot of aerospace jobs, sure, and it allows one to incorporate new technologies and lessons learned from previous missions. But on the other hand, it drives up the cost of each mission dramatically, and stretches out the gap between missions, the engineering and testing requiring more time to perform and budget limitations neccessarily restricting the frequency of expensive missions.
The development of a standard propulsion and power bus for deep space use would make a lot of sense, particularly if it is a modular system that can be “dialed” up or down as suits the particular mission. To some extent, this has already been attempted in the commercial satellite field (though there is still a lot of customer-driven customization of designs such as A2100), and in some of NASA’s earlier probes (the Voyager structural bus was the same as for the Pioneers sent to the outer planets, as I recall, but I can’t find a link to prove it). Certainly, some mission-specific customization would need to be done, but if the “chassis” design is mostly standardized, it should dramatically reduce the cost and lead-time for a given mission.
NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE: With a title like
International Meeting On Space And World Heritage, you might think it had something to do with protection of Apollo landing sites and the various robot landers on the Moon and Mars.
Nope.
I wonder when someone will get around to those sites. After all, with commercial ventures beginning to head out that way, with such sites as their likely targets for close-up filming and such, some sort of restrictions should be put in place for the protection of such sites.
Of course, one can also argue that the protection should be short-term, that the interests of historical preservation (not to mention engineering knowledge) would be better served by eventually bringing such artifacts back to Earth. It will of course be quite a while before that is even remotely practical (a couple of decades at least), but one shouldn’t rule out the possibility of NASM or its successor one day displaying the reassembled elements of Apollo 11 as it’s centerpiece exhibit.
ON SECOND THOUGHT I don’t want that to sound so harsh. As it is a private initiative, I wish Space-X well in their effort. My snarky point was simply that it sounds an awful lot like the Kistler approach.
Perhaps Space-X can put together a better business model and organization than Kistler did, and so secure the funding required to actually get their project off the ground. A cursory glance at their “Profiles” page is encouraging, as it seems pleasantly free of the sort of rainmakers recruited to such projects just to gold-plate the prospectus…names that have to be rewarded, in turn, with cushy sinecures and plush offices.
Good luck to them.
(Now if they could just get rid of that Flash animation on their website…)
SPACE-X: I had forgotten about Elon Musk’s new startup, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, which premiered online a couple of weeks or so ago.
Strange, but a reusable TSTO missile-form launch vehicle powered by kerosene sounds so familiar somehow…..I could swear that I’ve heard this idea before….hmm….
(Anyone care to bet how long it takes Space-X’s chrome-plated Titan vehicle to morph into the shape of a ketchup bottle?)
TODAY’S THEMIS IMAGE looks like a bad paint job over corroded metal… Scaly-Skinned Mars:
The style of erosion along the highlands-lowlands boundary of southern Elysium Planitia has produced a strange pattern of troughs that look like the skin of a reptile. In reality, a very clear process of landscape degradation is evident in this image. Some process has produced polygon-shaped troughs that create zones of weakness in the uppermost crust. It is likely that wind-blown particles deepen and widen the troughs, producing isolated knobs and mesas. Ultimately, the erosional reworking of the landscape is so complete that all signs of the upper layer are removed, leaving the smooth lowland surface to the north.
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