An expatriate Southerner in the Midwest, writing about writing and whatever dadgum else interests him. Author of the science fiction thrillers FROZEN ORBIT, FRONTIER, and ESCAPE ORBIT, published by Baen Books.
“Colorado has received a $200,000 federal grant to investigate building a spaceport east of the city, the Fort Collins Coloradoan reported. Backers say space travel could cut trip time between Denver and Australia from 20 hours to five.”
Being USA Today, it’s pretty light on details so I decided to go to the source. There’s nothing on the Ft. Collins paper’s website, but the Denver Post is on top of it.
I also don’t know where they get that five-hour figure. That’d be an average of Mach 3 or so; the speeds you’d need for a suborbital hop of that distance would easily be double.
Denver to Australia, through space? That’s crazy talk! Whoever would come up with such an outlandish idea? Really, somebody should write a book about it!
When is a secret spaceplane not a secret spaceplane? When we know about it ahead of time:
Next month, the X-37B will blast off again aboard an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The exact timing of the October launch is unknown and subject to change due to weather conditions, and there’s no telling how long the drone will stay in orbit. ”Preparations for launch at Cape Canaveral have begun,” Major Tracy Bunko, an Air Force spokesperson, told Space.com.
It’s funny how the sci/tech blogs get all twitterpated over this thing. X-37 was a NASA program that got money-whacked (like pretty much every other NASA project), and the Air Force wisely took it over. It fit the bill for a lot of capabilities they’d been wanting to develop anyway, so it’s not like they’ve reverse-engineered the Klingon cloaking device or something.
Which would probably be a bad thing, since they stole it from the Romulans to begin with. We’d be much better off just building our own cloaking device from scratch…
Perhaps the most succinct instruction that anyone could give our military. If only it had come as marching orders from the CinC instead of a eulogy from the widow of a fallen SEAL:
“It is easy to write a book about being a Navy SEAL, but it is very hard to write an obituary for one.”
“To all the Operators here today I give you this charge: Rid the world of those savages. I’ll say it again, RID THE WORLD OF THOSE SAVAGES!”
Now if you will allow me a little self-indulgence…
I was an active-duty Marine for six years. Nothing special, but I did my job and am proud of that service. Between that and the military college I graduated from, the martial virtues have left a lasting impact on my life.
Parris Island was no treat, but the additional training Spec Ops guys endure almost defies comprehension. The one trait they share that has always impressed me is their quiet confidence and humility. They carry a respect for their own abilities and those of their comrades, and don’t feel a need to show off.
If only more of us in less hazardous professions were like that. God bless the men and women who don’t hesitate to run towards the sound of gunfire.
Obama caught a lot of grief from conservatives over the decision to end the space shuttle program, when in reality this decision was made (correctly) by George W. Bush in 2007. Once enacted, it couldn’t be easily undone – supply chains and tooling were pretty much gone no matter what the Big O might have wanted.
The difference is that W had also directed NASA to develop a cheaper manned space capability that was supposed to be flying, well, this year.
Not seeing anything out there that looks like a new NASA vehicle? Nope, me neither. And that’s where the criticism comes from: along with the shuttles, Obama deep-sixed Constellation, which was Bush’s follow-on program. More accurately, it was the hobby horse of Bush’s NASA Administrator Mike Griffin – who literally wrote the book on spacecraft design – and was described as “Apollo on steroids.”
Which it was, sadly. Though a stupendous achievement and a source of great national pride to this day, Apollo was also a money sink that corrupted the thinking of an entire generation as to “how we do space.”
Constellation was deeply flawed and could only be fixed with a money injection that simply wasn’t going to happen. An independent review board composed of former aerospace execs and NASA astronauts determined that even if the whole program was dropped in their laps, fully developed and ready to go, that they still couldn’t afford to operate it. And in the meantime, Griffin was still diverting funding from other programs within the agency to prop up his personal favorite.
So yes, Obama was right to can it. He was also right to direct NASA to contract out their access to low-Earth orbit. In other words, as I’ve always preached: getting to and from orbit is well enough understood that it’s past time to let the private sector take over (while driving costs down, to boot). Let NASA save that money to buy rides into low orbit so they can develop the technology to routinely go beyond it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to afford a ticket. Maybe not. But it was never going to happen by doing it the NASA way.
Others have surmised the Prez did it because he doesn’t understand either spaceflight (most pols don’t) or the private sector (too many pols don’t; he’s just the worst example). It’s really the only substantially pro-free market decision he’s made, so “why” doesn’t really matter. It was the right call and he deserves credit for it.
Credit: NASA
So it pains me to see ostensibly “conservative” politicians trying to tar him with it – because if Obama’s for it, they’re agin’ it I suppose. While stubbornly refusing to accept the likes of SpaceX or Blue Origin, they still insist on throwing money down a hole to mandate that NASA build another big-@$$ rocket. While a new Saturn V-class launcher would be cool as heck to see, we don’t really need it. It would make a lot more sense to use smaller Atlas and Delta heavies with more launches and develop some kind of propellant depot capability in orbit. Given our experience in orbital rendezvous and construction, it’s hard to see how that’s not doable.
Fortunately, there are voices of reason on the (R) side who see things as they are. Here’s Dana Rorabacher (R-CA):
The bottom line is, in order to have steady funding, we’re going to have to defund every other space project that we have! Nobody here wants to face that! Maybe if we’re going to provide safety, maybe if we’re going to provide reliability and do this professionally, maybe we should set our goals to something we can actually accomplish within the budgets that are possible, without destroying every other aspect of the space program. I think that’s what’s happening here today. That’s what we’re really discussing.
I’m pretty sure SpaceX is in his district, so don’t discount the fact that he’s just advocating for the local gentry. That’s what congresscritters do. Fortunately, he’s on the right side of this debate.
In the larger picture, I’ve met a few politicians here & there and am convinced that most of them are just clueless. Maybe 10% are the real thinkers and visionaries, while the rest are followers who parrot the party line. They may more or less believe in their party’s platform, but for the most part are just along for the ride and know how to make people like them.
Well, you can’t say nobody warned us. Jesus told the disciples, to paraphrase, “There shall be wars, and rumors of wars. Do not concern yourselves with these things.”
Or if you prefer fire raining down from Heaven, dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!
Like I said, it’s not like we haven’t been warned. And much of this is just simply the result of people who should’ve known better acting in defiance of common sense.
So much to comment on, so little time. Short version: the world’s gone nuts. A picture being worth a thousand words, it’s probably just better to juxtapose a few images and point out some obvious contradictions…
1. The flag of our enemy flies over our embassies. A U.S. Ambassador is dead, along with an aide and their security detail – two former SEALS. Bloody handprints on a column at the supposed “safe house” speaks to the horror of their demise: Continue reading “End of the World Roundup”
Since I’m obviously biased, this article from NewScientist will have to speak for itself:
One day “intelligent” passenger aircraft will cruise across oceans in low-drag, energy-saving formations, like flocks of geese. So said European plane-maker Airbus at its annual technology look-ahead conference last night.
…
Airbus added that emissions could be cut by using a superfast ground vehicle to catapult future aircraft into the air, so that it reaches cruising speed and altitude faster. And it could land with the engines switched off, in a long, controlled “free glide” to the runway.
>Bias filter OFF…<
And of course, it’ll all be controlled by super-genius computers. Never underestimate Airbus’s ability to overestimate technology.
Or, for that matter, the popular media’s willingness to lap up a sexy new tech storie, no matter how much of it is just unicorns farting rainbows.
Where to begin?
Sure, airliners could fly formation. Maybe forming up in a big flying V would provide some marginal drag reductions, but not enough to make it worth the trouble. Just getting a single widebody planned, loaded, and prepped for a flight across the pond is enough work without having to coordinate the timing with a dozen other flights.
And of course all of this ignores the vagaries of weather and air traffic. Holding close formation through North Atlantic weather with hundreds of passengers on each airplane? Now there’s a disaster movie just waiting to be written.
Landing with the engines switched off? Theoretically, sure. But what happens if you miss the approach and have to go around?
Oh, right. Technology will solve all of that, I guess. But a couple of engines at flight idle just waiting to be spun up for a wave-off would be nice, too.
Here’s the deal: an optimum descent right now involves hardly any work from the engines. Where it becomes inefficient is when lots and lots of them are trying to get to the same place at the same time, so ATC has to get creative to maintain separation. It leads to something we call “dive and drive”. UPS and United have done a lot of work with the Feds to allow something called “constant descent” approaches, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. And it’s a lot more complicated than it might sound at first blush.
Interesting goings-on in our night sky recently – check out this amateur video of something big hitting something even bigger: Mysterious Impact Flash on Jupiter.
Now, understand I use the “amateur” term carefully. There’s a huge global network of astronomers out there who do this stuff purely for fun and personal interest. Some of the equipment they have is astounding, and they got mad skillz. Professional astronomers count on these guys for cataloging phenomena that the Big Dogs just can’t devote scope time to: stuff like variable stars, planetary occultations, Martian dust storms, and comets (many of the named comets were discovered by non-professionals).
Apparently that list also includes potential civilization-destroying rogue asteroids.
Yeah, I left the best part for last: from iO9, speculation that perhaps Jupiter took one for the team. There’s been a lot of that lately, come to think of it.
So, are the massive outer planets with their deep gravity wells actually a picket system for the smaller inner planets – namely, the ones that could support life? More specifically, ours?
This is a theory which has been gaining traction over the years. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (stop giggling), and Neptune patrol the far reaches of our solar system, sucking in or otherwise diverting species-threatening chunks of rock and ice that otherwise might find themselves on orbits that intersect ours at really inconvenient times. Like, you know, when we’re in the same place.
NEO (Near-Earth Object) detection has been getting more and more attention of late, but an observer’s position on our globe makes a big difference: if you’re in North America, most of the southern sky is permanently out of reach. If you’re in Australia, the problem is reversed. And as I understand it, there isn’t a lot of observing capability in the southern hemisphere. If you look at the distribution of population and land mass, it’s not hard to see why. But the rocks are still out there.
NASA has proposed a manned mission to a NEO using the Orion spacecraft it’s developing, and there are plenty of candidate asteroids out there. I’m all for it if they can afford it. Besides going farther than the Moon, to something humans have never encountered, it’s a good idea to understand these things better so as to be able to deflect or destroy them before one of them eventually gets pitched through the strike zone right into home plate.
So could NASA do it? Sure, if they ever get Orion flying. The whole idea is that it would need less delta-V than a lunar mission and it could be done without a specialized lander – so it’s less of an engineering hurdle and more of a logistics problem. LockMart has already studied this extensively, calling it the “Plymouth Rock” mission.
Could private space do it? Well, ya’ll can probably guess how I feel about that. Once a manned Dragon is ready, I’ll bet SpaceX could put a mission together in short order if they really wanted to.
This is why building routine low-cost access to space is important: it enables us get out there and do something about it. Space travel isn’t easy or inherently safe, but there’s no reason the mechanical aspects of it can’t be made reliable and modular. Which of course is exactly what SpaceX, Bigelow, XCor, Masten, et al., are trying to do.
Think about this: what would you need to put together an asteroid mission?
Well, there’s the transportation up and down: Dragon.
How about a crew habitat and life support? Bigelow Sundancers would be a good start.
Propulsion? I don’t know, maybe existing Centaur kick-stages or whatever that Russian booster Space Adventures is using for their lunar orbit tourist flight.
Get the idea? The basic components either exist or are in development with test articles already flown in orbit. But as they say, the devil’s in the details: radiation shielding being the most obvious. Leaving the protection of the Van Allen belts is a real hazard – the Apollo program didn’t really address it, placing their faith in probability. That is, the missions were of short enough duration that the likelihood of being fried by a Coronal Mass Ejection was acceptably low. But they also recognized that if they kept going, it would eventually happen. A two or three month flight to an asteroid raises the odds significantly.
Which brings us back to my point: none of this is without risk. But nothing worth doing ever is. In the meantime, if you want to get a good idea of the sort of widespread mayhem even a relatively small asteroid or comet could produce, check out this handy little Calculator of Mass Destruction.
And be thankful that our solar system has been blessed with these gas giants which are not only nice to look at, but which protect us from all manner of big space junk.
As if Amazon hasn’t given me enough gizmos, gadgetry, and geedunk to spend money on, now we have Apple’s annual festival of brand snobbery product event tomorrow.
OK, that was a little snarky. Admittedly I’m just jealous of all those people who can afford Macbooks. iPhones aren’t out of reach, but my employer already has me carrying a (cough cough) crackberry and I just don’t want to lug two smartphones around.
That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
iPods are a different story. Dadgum if I don’t love the little beasties, and if rumors hold true we should be seeing an all-new Nano introduced tomorrow. Behold the project known as Codename N31:
Nano-nano!
I’ve no idea how close to reality that rendering will be, since it originates with Japanese internet fanboys. But it certainly looks plausible, considering these aftermarket Nano cases are supposed to be the real deal:
Couple that with a reported shortage of current-gen Nanos (that is, Apple’s not sending replacement stock to retailers), and it’s a good bet we’ll see something new tomorrow.
Supposedly 16gb memory will be standard, but the big question is which operating system will it run? It would be great to load up a Nano with some of my kid’s Touch apps, but it’s hard to see how Apple would undercut their own product line like that.
The wild card in all this is the rumored iPad Mini. If they release a 7″ version that goes head-to-head against the Kindle Fire HD on price, then the market will get verrrry interesting. I’d have a hard time forking over $300 or so for a Mini if the Touch is still in the 200-250 range.
So why not just get a Touch? Because I’m really cheap – and really clumsy. The screen on a Touch wouldn’t last a week in my back pocket. Thus, I dig Nanos.
But I can dream. More rumory goodness at 9to5mac.com, which is where I found these pics and other juicy details.
In which I kinda, sorta, defend the President.
So could NASA do it? Sure, if they ever get Orion flying. The whole idea is that it would need less delta-V than a lunar mission and it could be done without a specialized lander – so it’s less of an engineering hurdle and more of a logistics problem. LockMart has already studied this extensively, calling it the “Plymouth Rock” mission.
The Chiles Files 