MarsBlog - Part 66

Light Posting…

…will continue for a few more weeks, until a certain proposal is handed in and I go back to working just one job.

Griffin’s Rationale

Jeff Foust, in a good bio of NASA Administrator appointee Michael Griffin, reproduces a quote from the man that is worthy of framing:

“What the U.S. gains from a robust, focused program of human space exploration is the opportunity to carry the principles and values of western philosophy and culture along with the inevitable outward migration of humanity into the solar system,? he said. Such an effort, he noted, would be similar to the influence the British Empire had because of its mastery of the seas. ?Can America, through its mastery of human space flight, have a similar influence on the cultures and societies of the future, those yet to evolve in the solar system as well as those here on Earth? I think so, and I think our descendants will consider it to have been worth twenty cents per day.”

Amen to that.

Not Quite “Salvage One”

Here’s a curious story from Baikonur: Metal Scavengers Detained at Russia?s Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan.

A spokesman for the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Vyacheslav Davidenko, has said that in late February interior ministry operatives found two CIS citizens on the territory of the space center. One of them was an Uzbek national. They were searching for pieces of non-ferrous alloys…However, the Kazakh migration police have told the agency that two Afghanis and one Pakistani citizen were detained on the territory of the space center on March 4. They infiltrated the facility in order to gather pieces of non-ferrous alloys. According to the source in the migration police, there were also two Kazakh citizens among the detainees who attempted to gather scrap metal on the territory of the Baikonur space center.

Sounds like a couple of space age can guys, collecting bits and pieces of aluminum and such for recycling cash, right? Well, maybe not:

Experts of the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys said a chemical analysis of pieces of non-ferrous alloys found at Baikonur could assist nations seeking to improve their missile technology.

Interesting. Unfortunately, the article leaves off there, with no further detail.

Wagging the Proposal

T-Space appears to be dropping out of at least the lunar lander portion of Constellation: Paperwork stops space privateers building lunar lander.

While others have focused on this paragraph:

“NASA wants 40 to 50 monthly reports on what you’re doing,” David Gump, president of the Transformational Space consortium told New Scientist on Monday. And while “we could build a great Crew Exploration Vehicle”, Gump says, the consortium cannot comply with the reports and studies NASA stipulates to monitor the project.

…what caught my eye was this:

While a consortium that includes Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, builders of the first privately owned spacecraft, say they can build a great spaceship, they don’t have the expertise or resources to do all the paperwork. [emphasis added]

Just yesterday, while listening to some of my coworkers bemoaning the long list of detailed cost and schedule estimates required by NASA, and all the work required to produce such figures using internal estimating relationships based on past projects, it occurred to me to wonder how T-Space (or any individual startup) could possibly submit a winning CEV proposal, given that they by definition lack a substantial historical data set from which to draw this information.

This is a topic outside my area of expertise, so perhaps industry-wide statistics or other substitutes are available for this purpose. Anyone?

Nukes…In…Spaaaaaaace!

Bruce Gagnon today returns to one of our favorite topics: space nuclear power.

About the only thing worth the bother of commenting on here is his mistaken reference to Prometheus as being a “nuclear rocket” project. The Prometheus spacecraft are (were?) to use ion propulsion systems, running on electricity provided by an advanced-design nuclear reactor. As Deep Space One showed, ion propulsion does not require a nuclear reactor for its electricity supply — thus, an ion engine is not a “nuclear rocket”. (In contrast, the test engines produced under NERVA/ROVER were quite plainly “nuclear rockets”…sadly, he has no reason at present to protest against those.)

He does, however, include one bit of useful advice, regarding NASA’s public commentary period on space nuclear power, open from now through April 11:

Even though NASA does not want to listen to the public, let’s make sure they hear from us anyway. (People from outside the U.S. are also encourage to write. This is a global issue!) Send your comments to: osspluto@hq.nasa.gov.

Since he was so helpful to bring this to our attention, and even provide the appropriate email address, we shouldn’t let him down.

Diverging Paths

This story seems to put to rest the accusations from certain quarters that the ball has been dropped on the VSE…the Usual Suspects are at least forging ahead with PR campaigns to build public support for the new NASA goals. Which is a good thing, if you support the VSE, or just the idea of NASA actually doing something productive for a change (Moon landings or otherwise).

What verges on the bizarre in this piece, however, is the complete lack of acknowledgement of the emerging space startups. SpaceShipOne isn’t even mentioned. It is as if there is no path to space except the one being shown here by NASA and the aerospace giants. And what a path it is, with references to “new frontiers”, to exploration as “A Desire Written In The Human Heart”, and to “imagination” — the same slogans used for four decades to push the Saganian/Von Braunian vision. One wonders, reading this article, which vision for space exploration NASA sees.

The “exploration” part of the VSE should give us pause. Despite the marketing hooks intended to push the frontier sentimentality button, “exploration” suggests the familiar seeing, sampling, mapping, etc., and then leaving when all that work has been completed. The new commercial entities are talking about just the opposite — about developing space, which implies going there to stay rather than just to look around and take a few postcard pics to show the folks back home. Not “flags and footprints”, but “commerce and colonies”. They aren’t mired in the nostalgia for the 1960’s which positively oozes from this article.

So yes, it looks like NASA and the Usual Suspects are indeed pressing forward with the VSE. The problem is, how will they actually get anywhere if they insist on looking backwards as they do so?

Even the Agency’s Acronym is Suspicious

Bruce Gagnon exposes hundreds of thousands of Nazis, right here in America:

“What I do mean,” says Cook, “is that if you follow the trail of Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited by America at the end of the second world war, the unfortunate corollary is that by taking on the science, you take on – unwittingly – some of the ideology…What do you lose along the way?”

Could this be what former President Dwight Eisenhower was talking about just a few years later when in 1961 he warned the American people to “beware” of the power of the military industrial complex? Could Eisenhower’s prophetic warning been that an ideological contamination had come from America’s embracing of the Nazi operatives?

The woman who called me tonight recently wrote a letter to the editor telling her community the story about the Nazi’s creating the U.S. space program. The responses called her crazy. Even her own son, a local fire fighter, was outraged with her over the letter and told her that she should support George W. Bush or not talk politics to him ever again. She called me to ask for more evidence which I gladly will provide her.

So, since I work for a defense contractor, on space-program-related projects, that makes me a Nazi too? Who knew?

Hugh Hewitt made a good point in this regard during last night’s commute. In regard to Sen. Byrd comparing Republican Senators wishing to amend the voting rules regarding “advice and consent” on judicial appointments to Hitler, Hewitt observed that any time someone brings up Hitler or the Nazis in a debate, they have immediately gone over the line. This may just appear to be a paraphrase of Godwin’s Law, but there is a normative element that the usual interpretation of Godwin admits — bringing in the Nazis shouldn’t just mean that the discussion has reached a point of diminishing returns, it should mean the discussin is over. Accusing one’s opponents of being Nazis should not be acceptable in polite discourse. Period.

I’m well aware of Operation Paperclip, and the Nazi pasts of several important figures in American space exploration. One can argue whether their participation in the Nazi regime was a matter of individual choice, and what their individual moral culpability might have been for the atrocities attributed to the V2/A4 project…fine. But to make a blanket assertion that the influence of these hundred or so men somehow imparts Nazi proclivities on everyone in the U.S. defense and space industries even today is both absurd and insulting.

Nice Pics

ESA has posted a selection of excellent images from the HRSC aboard Mars Express, showing apparent evidence of volcanic and fluvial activity on Mars.

Speaking of Colonization…

…this article on the recent STAIF conference discusses it. Unfortunately, it falls prey to the gold-rush-of-the-week’s companion problem: the focus on whizbang new technologies as requirements for settlement to take place.

Again, what seems to be missing is discussion of the old-fashioned technologies, like monetary and banking systems, stock and commodities markets, trade systems, etc. that will result in a stable, diversified extraterrestrial economy. “Technology-über-alles” is really no more helpful than the “Science-über-alles” attitude that has afflicted space exploration since its inception.

Martin’s Fig Leaf

Mark Whittington asks the snarky question I wanted to ask, myself. But, it seems the “slap in the face” isn’t quite what it appears to be:

Except that Canada is up to its neck — by choice — in the shield’s key detection, tracking and identification systems, the networks of radar that are watched every second of every day by joint North American Aerospace Defence Command teams of military personnel in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo. Last summer, the Martin government explicitly agreed to use NORAD, complete with its Canadian component, as the front half of continental missile defence.

Or, as Canada’s next ambassador to Washington, Frank McKenna, put it quite accurately: “We’re part of it now.”

With the NORAD problem solved, there’s no need to try to pry the Canadians out of the mountain or keep them away from missile defence data processing so, in Mr. McKenna’s words, Ottawa “has already given a great deal of what the United States needs.”

That doesn’t sound like poking Uncle Sam in the eye, which may be good politics for a minority government prime minister. But if American outrage was hoped for, it wasn’t evident yesterday. Rather, there was a resigned sense that Canada is a sometimes-reliable ally.

All Mr. Martin has opted out of, really, is joint responsibility for pushing the firing button. The interceptor missiles would still rise from their silos in Alaska and California to kill incoming warheads, whether they are bound for Vancouver or Seattle.

In practical terms, the officer peering at the radar screen may be a Canadian. The officer who determines that the incoming blip is a warhead may be a Canadian. But the decision to fire an interceptor would always be made by an American.

Canada won’t have it own interceptors or radars, but then none were ever planned.

Nor can Canada claim that it has opted out of the concept of missile defence, so long as its military personnel are watching for and tracking that possible threat.

The ostensible refusal to join in missile defense looks more like a political fig-leaf for Paul Martin, enabling him to say that Canada won’t join the hated USericans in their nefarious missile defense system…while doing exactly that.

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