I'm preparing to head east for a meeting of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts group (NIAC)... and a couple of other DC area events: one for the White House (OSTP), one for the Caltech Alumni Assn, and an AIAA panel on future military aircraft... followed by an appearance at the Ideacity idea festival in Toronto.
Busy trip. Busy topics. Busy times for a civilization that deserves far-seeing citizens and leaders.
== Thinking big about space ==
If you are anywhere near the Washington DC - Baltimore area July 1-3, consider attending the Escape Velocity convention - a micro futuristic world's fair focusing on Science Fiction and STEAM education, sponsored by the new DC area Museum of Science Fiction.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced an ambitious new plan to land an unmanned spacecraft on Mars as soon as 2018 with NASA providing technical support -- "an extraordinary collaboration between the public and private sectors in an effort to eventually get humans to the Red Planet."
As no doubt all of you know, in another success for Elon: SpaceX launched a communications satellite into orbit and for the fourth time they were able to recover the rocket, again on a drone ship at sea. This was another really tough geosynchronous launch like the previous one and hence may not be re-usable except for spares. But that just makes it double impressive! And... onboard cameras covered the rocket's descent.
Amazon and Blue Origins CEO Jeff Bezos wants to build giant factories in space... to save the Earth, proclaiming a vision of "millions of people living and working in space."
After an initial failure, NASA inflated the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, an essential tech for human-crewed spaceflight. And we are on our way to 2016 being as terrific a year for our outward progress as fantastic as 2015 was.
Busy trip. Busy topics. Busy times for a civilization that deserves far-seeing citizens and leaders.
== Thinking big about space ==
If you are anywhere near the Washington DC - Baltimore area July 1-3, consider attending the Escape Velocity convention - a micro futuristic world's fair focusing on Science Fiction and STEAM education, sponsored by the new DC area Museum of Science Fiction.Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced an ambitious new plan to land an unmanned spacecraft on Mars as soon as 2018 with NASA providing technical support -- "an extraordinary collaboration between the public and private sectors in an effort to eventually get humans to the Red Planet."
As no doubt all of you know, in another success for Elon: SpaceX launched a communications satellite into orbit and for the fourth time they were able to recover the rocket, again on a drone ship at sea. This was another really tough geosynchronous launch like the previous one and hence may not be re-usable except for spares. But that just makes it double impressive! And... onboard cameras covered the rocket's descent.
Amazon and Blue Origins CEO Jeff Bezos wants to build giant factories in space... to save the Earth, proclaiming a vision of "millions of people living and working in space."
After an initial failure, NASA inflated the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, an essential tech for human-crewed spaceflight. And we are on our way to 2016 being as terrific a year for our outward progress as fantastic as 2015 was.
Canadian firm Thoth Technology Inc. has been granted both U.S. and U.K. patents for an inflatable tower designed to take astronauts up into the stratosphere, so they can then be propelled into space. A freestanding structure complete with an electrical elevator up to a 20km (12.5 miles) high launch platform. In other words in all ways precisely the design that I described in my novel Sundiver (1980). Anyone remember the Vanilla Needle? One difference. Mine was big enough that balloons could use buoyancy in the high pressure space to lift cargoes most of the way.
Yuri Milner, the Russian philanthropist and Internet entrepreneur,
announced a plan on Tuesday to send a fleet of robots no bigger than iPhones to Alpha Centauri. “Once in orbit, the probes would unfold thin sails and then,
propelled by powerful laser beams from Earth,” say reports The $10 billion
project aims to accelerate the mini-probes to a fifth of the speed of light…
perhaps a bit of an ambitious goal for Earth-based lasers just a decade or two
from now. See also “Instead of starships, try StarChips.”
A more extensive exploration of Milner’s many Breakthrough Institute projects, in collaboration with Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and former NASA Ames head Pete Worden -- including a vast expansion of SETI, can be found in The Atlantic, and a detailed technical
description of the plans will appear on the project’s website.
A final note on this, for now. Those of you who have purchased Insistence of Vision know that one story - “The Avalon Probes” – offers up an ironic
commentary on exactly this approach. And of course… it’s an early version of exactly the scenario that
I mapped out – more seriously detailed - in Existence. With one exception. I proposed that before going interstellar we
aim for an earlier, intermediate goal of the solar gravitational lens focal
zone, just 550 astronomical units out.
Seriously, the Breakthrough Institute could probably use one more advisory board member….
== Forcing a return to the
(useless) moon, instead of getting rich out there ==
Space politicized? The current U.S. House of Representatives, already the laziest and most dogmatically useless
national legislative body in American history, has now altered NASA’s budget,
forcing the space agency to return to a Bush Era priority: “no funds are
included in this bill for NASA to continue planning efforts to conduct either
robotic or crewed missions to an asteroid. Instead, NASA is encouraged to
develop plans to return to the Moon.”
To be clear, there should be nothing political about these priorities. I serve on neutral commissions to evaluate missions based on their likely scientific and other outcomes. Nearly all scientists agree that there is little or nothing to be gained from any near term manned return to the sterile lunar surface, which offers humanity nothing of any near future value. Though the region called 'cis-lunar space' - the orbit just above the moon - is seen as extremely valuable.
In contrast, both scientific and commercial interest in asteroids is intense,
with several nations and companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries eagerly investing in what could be the 21st Century’s giga-Gold
Rush.
The Obama Administration’s and NASA’s goal for manned flight - ramping up operations in lunar orbit, learning to both study asteroidal resources and work on extended missions - is exactly right and supported by the best expert advice.
Expertise that the current House leadership banished from Congress when they disbanded their own Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) for the crime of presenting them with fact-based analyses. Instead, leaders like Dennis Hastert, Thomas DeLay, John Boehner and Paul Ryan chose to rely on majority members’ gut instincts.
Those guts have made this matter - which should be nonpartisan and scientific - part of culture war, with one party praising Return To The Moon for no other reason, certainly not science or potential profit. Their sole rationalization? “The Europeans and Chinese are talking about moon trips!”
Yeah, so? Let the Chinese and Europeans and billionaire tourists have that sterile ball. We have lifted our gaze to more interesting and likely far more rewarding vistas. Vistas that only the United States can take on, instead of being copycats. (Hint for U.S. voters: let's get rid of those twits?)
There's more. When the Obama Administration canceled the Bush boondoggle Constellation Programs, it seemed that money might be spent on actual missions to explore the cosmos. Instead, Congress in 2010 imposed a restoration of core elements of Constellation, called the Space Launch System (SLS), resurrecting many Space Shuttle components for a system without any mission on the near or intermediate horizons. And now the GOP-run House and Senate have since imposed increases in the SLS budget, mostly at the expense of science missions. All of this against a backdrop of success in the Obama endeavor to spin off and commercialize orbital launch services to private companies, which are developing capabilities at a vastly quicker rate. (Example: most of the expensive SLS systems will be rendered redundant by - for example - the SpaceX Falcon Heavy and Dragon capsule.)
“Unfortunately, once the rocket is built, the expenses don't end. Ground crews must be kept ready, supply lines kept open, and contractors taken care of. These fixed costs can be enormous. For the space shuttle, those costs amounted to about $2.5 billion annually—whether the vehicle flew or not…” So much for the party that opposes government boondoggles. Of course part of it is pure pork: Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), wants SLS because it is managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. And MSFC has been Instrumental for 30 years in systematically preventing humans from getting into space.
See my earlier posting: Does the moon beckon us back?
Asteroids seem a more promising target in the near future....
To be clear, there should be nothing political about these priorities. I serve on neutral commissions to evaluate missions based on their likely scientific and other outcomes. Nearly all scientists agree that there is little or nothing to be gained from any near term manned return to the sterile lunar surface, which offers humanity nothing of any near future value. Though the region called 'cis-lunar space' - the orbit just above the moon - is seen as extremely valuable.
In contrast, both scientific and commercial interest in asteroids is intense,
with several nations and companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries eagerly investing in what could be the 21st Century’s giga-Gold
Rush.The Obama Administration’s and NASA’s goal for manned flight - ramping up operations in lunar orbit, learning to both study asteroidal resources and work on extended missions - is exactly right and supported by the best expert advice.
Expertise that the current House leadership banished from Congress when they disbanded their own Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) for the crime of presenting them with fact-based analyses. Instead, leaders like Dennis Hastert, Thomas DeLay, John Boehner and Paul Ryan chose to rely on majority members’ gut instincts.
Those guts have made this matter - which should be nonpartisan and scientific - part of culture war, with one party praising Return To The Moon for no other reason, certainly not science or potential profit. Their sole rationalization? “The Europeans and Chinese are talking about moon trips!”
Yeah, so? Let the Chinese and Europeans and billionaire tourists have that sterile ball. We have lifted our gaze to more interesting and likely far more rewarding vistas. Vistas that only the United States can take on, instead of being copycats. (Hint for U.S. voters: let's get rid of those twits?)
There's more. When the Obama Administration canceled the Bush boondoggle Constellation Programs, it seemed that money might be spent on actual missions to explore the cosmos. Instead, Congress in 2010 imposed a restoration of core elements of Constellation, called the Space Launch System (SLS), resurrecting many Space Shuttle components for a system without any mission on the near or intermediate horizons. And now the GOP-run House and Senate have since imposed increases in the SLS budget, mostly at the expense of science missions. All of this against a backdrop of success in the Obama endeavor to spin off and commercialize orbital launch services to private companies, which are developing capabilities at a vastly quicker rate. (Example: most of the expensive SLS systems will be rendered redundant by - for example - the SpaceX Falcon Heavy and Dragon capsule.)
See my earlier posting: Does the moon beckon us back?
Asteroids seem a more promising target in the near future....
