MarsBlog.net

This article at SpaceDaily.com caught my eye, for what may or may not be obvious reasons.

Local color aside, McKnight makes some interesting points regarding the generational shift occurring in the space industry. Though some might take exception to this:

In some ways, though, we have changed as a nation. The builders of Apollo were a generation in lockstep: they spent their childhoods exposed to the breadlines and work projects of the Great Depression, then donned uniforms in early adulthood. Their whole lives had been organized by the government in a way unimaginable to the world today, outside Cuba and North Korea. Apollo was simply one more directive in their commanded lives.

it’s not far off the mark.

He also nails it on the head regarding “mule” projects:

A crash project, to be at all effective, must have a sole deliverable: a nuclear bomb, a superconducting supercollider, “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

Once done, it’s done. Lacking breadth, lacking roots in the rest of society, it cannot be a living, growing thing. We are left with flags and footprints.

An excellent article.

Going on right now: Fourth Annual Mars Settlement Design Competition:

The game scenario is set in the middle of the 21st century, when The Foundation Society, a fictitious private organization that promotes human exploration and colonization of space, issues an urgent call to industry to propose a design and operating plan for a new Mars base.

The site for the competition is here, complete with Flash intro.

I believe the Orange County or San Diego AIAA section sponsors a similar competition.

In Nuclear Hammers and Nuclear Hamstrings, SpaceDaily’s Ralph L. McNutt Jr. administers a reality check on the subject of space nuclear power (SNP).

While SNP would not work out for the near-term Pluto-Kuiper missions under consideration, he says, it is vital for the exploration of Mars and the outer solar system:

In high priority Mars surface missions using rovers, as well as in the outer solar system, light levels are simply too low to provide enough electrical power to do all that the science requires.

Better solar cells will not fix the problem, as the technology is pushing close to the power-generation limits imposed by physics, and nuclear power sources are required for long range rovers on Mars and most missions beyond the main asteroid belt, where radioisotope thermoelectric generators have been the workhorse of all outer planet missions for decades.

While resumed/upgraded production of RTGs will support current mission plans and even allow us to gain experience with electric propulsion, he sees them as a stopgap while much more powerful miniaturized fission power systems are developed.

He’s right, of course — its green glamour aside, solar power just won’t be enough — but the space advocacy community needs to do more to persuade the public of this. And beyond just convincing the public that it is required, we need to present both the risks and the benefits an accurate, understandable, and credible manner, in order to counter the inevitable kneejerk anti-nuclear hysteria that will greet flights of new SNP systems.

This is something we should begin now. We can’t afford to wait until, like Cassini, the payload is stacked for launch.

I’ve spent most of my spare time over the past two weeks preparing a slide show on the solar system, which I presented yesterday at Slidell Junior High. A good bit of the information I used came from the terrific Nine Planets website, which is chock full of interesting bits of trivia along with all the basic facts about just about everything in the solar system.

While the show was not specifically about Mars, I did manage to squeeze in a bit of Mars lore, mostly in how Mars and it’s oddities (more to the point, explaining those oddities) led us to discover the structure of the solar system, gravitation, and calculus, and to develop better telescopes and observation methods which ultimately led to the HST. I also mentioned that Mars is the most promising body in the solar system for settlement purposes, and why.

It seemed to go over well. The kids were so enthusiastic and had so many questions that I barely made it past Pluto-Charon. This is a good sign, and I plan to do more such presentations in the future.