Space news! NASA. NIAC. Lunar landers and tourism.

I was in DC for a week, first to give a colloquium at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, then for three days of meetings with the staff and Phase One fellows of NASA’s Innovative and Advance Concepts NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, as a member of NIAC’s External Council.

(See the range of bold research endeavors, and pencil in September 24-27 to tune in to the NIAC Symposium, in Huntsville. I'll announce when/where.)  I also spoke at The International Space Development Conference and at a couple of future-concerned agencies.

In related news, NASA announced that it was hiring Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and Orbit Beyond to carry its first modern set of science experiments and technology demonstrations to the moon. Astrobotic was stimulated in part by past NIAC grants and all three are pondering using NIAC-fostered technologies. Read about some of the target sites for the first wave of landers.

Grabbing some well-timed spotlight just before this announcement: Jeff Bezos revealed his own planned, much larger -- and likely human-rated lunar lander -- 'Blue Moon'... (Let's set aside the unfortunate vibe of the eponymous song -- no matter.) 

Most of you know that I'm not a big fan of near-term manned lunar expeditions down to that dusty-poison plain by the U.S. (see below). Oh, for sure HUMANITY will go back to that gritty-useless desert soon (and that’s fine!), because whole bunches of Apollo wannabes are anxious to have their rites of big-boy adulthood there... a "bar moonzvah" so to speak. And yes, some exploring will get done. I even hope they'll prove me wrong about Luna being a barren wasteland. 

(So far, it seems that except for a little ice at sunless depths (hence no solar power) down at the poles, there's simply no real (beyond arm-waving) evidence that anything of any immediate value is accessible down there, near term. Except tourism!  And as Andy Weir shows in ARTEMIS, that could have real value. The Chinese, Indians, Russians, and billionaires will spend for that.

Hence, I raise a glass and cheer for Jeff's new lander, a terrific money-maker that will get those Apollo Wannabes to pay development costs. Design, build and sell it, Jeff. Better yet, lease it to em!  Yankee industry. Sell it and free up NASA to do other things.

What other things? While continuing to keep our lunar hand in, with robots, NASA should join the Japanese and the smarter zillionaires heading off to do stuff that no one else can do.  And yes, Jeff has now completely undermined his favorite person, Donald Trump. Love it. 

== More space! More space! ==

An amazing find! Two galaxies that appear not to have any appreciable amounts of Dark Matter.  No, we’re not “seeing” the DM. But we can see that in nearly all galaxies, stars orbit the galactic center quickly, revealing the galactic mass is much bigger than the sum total of stars, planets and dust/gas. There are also measurable gravitational lensing effects. These galaxies show markedly different orbital speeds.  The implications are huge.

Offering a glimpse of Earth’s distant future, astronomers found a massive chunk of debris orbiting a white dwarf that could be a 125-mile round fragment of an Earth-like planetary core, leftover from the death of its original star. Periodic changes in the star’s spectra—repeating every 123 minutes—seemed to bear out a fairly substantially sized object, rather than dust.

In 1946 British engineers proposed a highly plausible sub-orbital, manned rocket that would have advanced spaceflight by a decade. Megaroc. SO? Have a glimpse of what might have been in my colleague Mary Robinette Kowal's recent Nebula Award winning novella The Calculating Stars, in which we urgently push ahead to achieve... by 1958... something incredible, led by a clade of women who are even more-incredible still.

As if from the pages of EXISTENCE...  A meteor from another solar system may have hit Earth, and the implications are fascinating. 

Um, and speaking of alien objects. In 2017, the Pentagon first confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a government operation launched in 2007 to collect and analyze info on “anomalous aerospace threats” from “advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters.” … In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these 'vehicles' had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

To consider in context: It's been 25+ years since any new techs were announced from the various Defense Department Skunk Works. Used to be, we’d get some kind of revelation, e.g. stealth bombers, at least once per decade, showing something for our tax dollars. I do know things are at least marginally farther along than we are told, when it comes to hypersonics, lasers, and ABM abilities, though by how much? 

Another piece to the puzzle. Some years ago the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA two Hubbles. Yes, two Hubble Space Telescopes. Well, not quite. They were the optics-guts of obsolete Earth observing spy satellites, and we thus discovered that the Hubble had been a “beard” for the spysat program, all along.  The gift put NASA in a bind – getting two billion-dollar spacecraft for free is nice, unless you don’t have the quarter of a billion it would take to repurpose them for real science.  One of them has been repurposed now and will launch soon as a great new mission -- WFIRST -- but it took a while. (I visited the WFIRST lab-correlate while at NASA Goddard, last week.)

But the lesson is clear. Stuff goes on, behind the scenes. Some “wasted” funding may have only been diverted (see my old novella “Senses, Three and Six” from my collection The River of Time). Some civilian events or endeavors may be (partly) “beards.” And yes, I have a theory about these "sightings" that you've likely not seen anywhere ;-)

Above all, we need to pray and hope that members of our defender caste really are (as I believe) nearly all devoted public servants and not how Fox-and-ilk portray them – as Deep State enemies of the people.

== Inspirational perspectives ==

I'm a fan of Isaac Arthur’s series of podcasts about the vast range of ambitious endeavors we might pursue… if we manage to get past the mewling panic of ankle-grabbing troglodytes in our own species. He’s covered a vast range of topics, including “uplifting animals to sapience.” And there are times when I find he makes unwarranted assumptions – e.g. the silly concept that the Moon has copious “resources” readily accessible with current technology. (Baloney.) Still, it’s amazing stuff, vividly delivered, sometimes inspiring and even eye-popping.  Here’s one of the most-amazing, from a science fictional perspective, on Orbital Rings.

Plywood delivery drones that cost just a few hundreds of dollars may soon be deployed for re-supply missions for the Marines.

Wanna personal flying machine? “GoFly, the $2M+, two-year global competition to create a safe, quiet, and ultra-compact personal flyer, just awarded prizes to five teams across the globe for their winning prototypes. (via Peter Diamandis.)

I’ve long touted the Age of Amateurs — the skyrocketing of hobbies and avocations that prove the very opposite of the “decadent-lazy” accusation often hurled at modern citizens. See now these citizen science expeditions.

A British system pre-cools air that’s been compressed during hypersonic flight so it can safely be used in a hybrid jet-rocket engine, potentially paving the way for a single flight to orbit space plane.

== Not just another anti-loony rant, but a forecast! ==

Okay, I can’t help myself. Here is a reprint of my earlier prediction that a jingoist, flag-waving, U.S.-only-yay! Mission to repeat Apollo would very soon become international’d.

Look ahead for what's intended, downstream, by those pushing the U.S. to "race back to the moon." Some dismiss the Pence-Trump lunar-declaration as pompous jingoism without scientific or national merit, misdirecting U.S. space resources and efforts toward copycatting past glories. But I'm astonished anyone believes that potemkin farce, that isn't even proposing a tenth of the needed funding. It won't and cannot remain a "race." Here is what’ll happen, if Republicans remain in power, prioritizing a moon-race over heading out to prospect and rake-in asteroidal wealth. 

As costs mount, suddenly, at a politically opportune time, the White House will announce:

"Huzzah, rejoice! We negotiated making the moon landing mission a joint-international project!! 

It will be more efficient, spreading costs!!! It will set an example of international cooperation and a spirit of pan-human accomplishment!!!! 

One giant step for humanity and peace!!!!!!"  (One accomplishment will be a ratchtting of exclamation points.)

Unspoken will be: No one in the U.S. wanted to pay a hundred billion to "win" a "race" against the Chinese and other Apollo wannabes, desperate to prove themselves on that dusty-useless plain.

Unspoken also: We will pay all right, by transferring all of U.S. technology to our new "partners."

Make no mistake, that’s the end game for the jingo-competitive "race"... as it was for "U.S. Space Station Freedom." Our money and space tech to help them get their glory moment in dust, while our chance to gain actual wealth-value out there gets tossed away.

 But I was wrong about how long it would take. Administration officials are already hinting at this, while echoes from the "moon race" announcement haven't even faded. Ah.

And a coda: Space is poised for explosive growth - let's get it right!