MarsBlog.net

MOON ROCKERS: Four people have been arrested for stealing moon rocks from Johnson Space Center.

The natural response to this is outrage that someone would even think of doing this — after all, these are materials of nearly holy relic status. How could they do this?

The real question should be: how could they do this? Sure, no security system is as tight as its operators would like you to believe, but still…wouldn’t you expect the Lunar Receiving Laboratory (or whatever it is called nowadays) to just maybe be under just a little bit tighter security than the rest of JSC? It makes you wonder what someone else, with similar access but motivated by malevolence rather than greed, could have accomplished…especially in light of the upcoming (someday) launch of the first Israeli astronaut.

On the other hand, one ought to think about just why someone would be willing to pay $1000/gram for, well, dirt…something that should be as common and cheap as souvenir black sand from Hawaii. The stuff is the target of theives and could fetch such a ridiculous price (around a hundred times its weight in gold) precisely because there is so little of it available on Earth. And that is so, because we have yet to return to the Moon. After all, who in their right mind would pay $1000/gram for lunar rock when they could instead pay half as much for a ticket to Clavius Base, where they could scoop up a ten pound bag of the stuff for free while enjoying a long weekend at the Space Spa?

MORE SATURN V WORSHIP: In honor of the anniversary and all…Take a look at this CD-ROM set on the Saturn V.

Oh, sure, much of the info on these discs is available free online at NASA websites (specifically here and here and here/here…)

RETURN TO MOON, GO TO MARS: Mark Whittington of Curmudgeons Corner tells NASA where to go.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY: As you may recall, today is the 33rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Rand Simberg has developed a way to commemorate the day (and space exploration as a whole), which he describes here.

I had given thought to writing up a lengthy “What If?” column for today, speculating on what direction the space program might have taken had the hardware from Apollo remained in production, but I couldn’t get a good handle on it. There were so many upgrades and evolved versions of the Saturn vehicles>, for example, that it’s hard to pick a winner.

Even so, it’s not difficult to imagine Apollo hardware having been enhanced to support permanent bases on the Moon, as well as launching large space stations. There were numerous proposals for uprating the Saturn V, some by as much as a factor of two, and much could have been done to any Saturn derivative over an extended production run to improve produceability and reduce manufacturing costs. With appropriate docking/berthing hardware, multiple Skylab-derived station modules could have been mated together to provide an enormous space station in short order at minimal cost. Had there been the will to continue with these things, and the foresight to milk what we already had available instead of junking it all and starting over, we could very well be exploring Mars by now.

LOOKING THROUGH NASA’S CRYSTAL BALL: What comes next, after the ISS mess is sorted out? Leonard David takes a look at NASA’s plans for the future, from a strategic plan put together by HEDS.

• Near-term Plans, 2000-2005 — Commercial Development, Space Shuttle 7- to 14-day mission duration, International Space Station 30- to 90-day missions
  • Shuttle operations privatization
  • Shuttle upgrades (until a replacement system is available)
  • Space Shuttle, ISS, and expendable launchers are foundations for utilization and commercialization of Earth orbit
  • “As the Space Station develops, NASA will open the facility aggressively to commercial use.” (Note the structure of that sentence…hmm.)
  • Encouragement of entrepreneurs and scientists to use the station for “Pathfinder” projects “to bring business concepts to reality”.
  • HEDS Enterprise to partner with industry and organizations to develop and demonstrate new technologies (Would those be “critical technologies”, “enabling technologies”, or “emerging technologies”?)
• Mid-term Plans, 2006-2011 — Extending human reach beyond low-Earth orbit, 100-day mission duration
  • Continuation of the beyond-Earth-orbit exploration begun during Apollo
  • 100-day class missions to Earth-moon and Earth-sun libration points, where new space telescopes and exploration “infrastructures” (very, very small buildings?) could be set up
  • Further exploration of the lunar surface
  • Accumulation of experience, which would reduce risk and cost of the more ambitious follow-on missions
  • Development of commercial resource utilization on the Moon and ISRU support of operations on other planets (Mars, perhaps? Oops, no, we can’t say that specifically, can we?)
  • Establishment of space-based and lunar “infrastructures” (!) to support space commercialization and thereby future exploration plans
• Long-term Plans, 2012-2015 — Extending human reach beyond Earth orbit, 500- to 1000-day mission duration
  • Exploration of martian surface via robots, to support “integrated human/robotic missions” to the planet (though the focus here appears to be on martian geoscience, rather than establishing a permanent presence on the planet)
  • Possible exploration and commercial exploitation of asteroids between Earth and Jupiter, by robotic probes and/or humans
• Beyond — Mission duration, 2000-day and longer
  • Possible human missions to Ganymede and Titan later in the century, based on knowledge and infrastructure developed during earlier missions.

  Well, it’s ambitious. A few slides further into the presentation, there is a “strategic roadmap” which gives a little more detail as to how these plans might be carried out.

  One subtle detail that catches my eye is the definition of the “phases” based on mission duration. It sneaks in the idea that human presence elsewhere in the solar system will be on a temporary, rotating basis — or, more to the point, it ignores permanent settlement. To me, this reflects a bias in favor of continuing the “professional astronaut class” mentality, by which space is to be the exclusive domain of highly-trained NASA professionals: “You can’t go there yourself, but you can watch and cheer as our heroes race, Phoebus-like, across the heavens and back to Earth again.”

  To be fair, there are numerous references in the document to research that will “enable humans to live and work permanently in space”, but the plans themselves don’t seem to reflect this. Even the strategic roadmap for this research reflects a mission-oriented rather than permanent settlement bias — for example, the research into technologies that “enable humans to work in space or on other planets — independent of Earth-provided logistics — for extended periods” (emphasis mine)…but not permanently.

  On the other hand, there are a number of heartening items in the document. For example, the plan for complete transition of ISS to a “customer-driven commercial operation”, and the numerous calls for commercial participation, commercial development, and the use of commercially-provided infrastructure and services to support future undertakings. Indeed, there is an entire section on commercial development of space (note the logo in the upper right corner of the slides in this section…very clever). In this section are proposals to streamline commercial access to ISS, allow docking of commercial modules and payloads to the station, and the development of a fully-commercial infrastructure co-orbiting with the ISS and using it “primarily as a service center”. A glaring omission here is space tourism, but nothing in the text seems to preclude it as one of the potential “commercial activities” — an explicit mention of tourism would have been a plus, though.