Back from Space Access '06

Sorry for the long delay in posting. Space Access '06 went very well, though the trip back home didn't go quite so well. This year I took little Jon and Tiff along with me, and the three of us drove down from the Bay Area. The trip down was uneventful, and actually not too bad at all. On our return trip on Sunday however, right as we were about to cross the Arizona/California border, Little Jonny started barfing. And kept barfing. We stopped near the border in Blythe, CA for 2 hours, where he proceeded to barf about every 5-10 minutes. We were really worried, but found a way to keep him hydrated, until we could get him to our Aunt and Uncle's place there in LA. He was feeling a bit better the next day, so we swung through Mojave on the way back up to the Bay Area. Visited XCOR's shop. Got to see their X-Racer prototype they were putting together, as well as some other things they were working on. I really liked the simple low-cost way they were mocking up the propulsion section for the vehicle, we'll have to borrow some of that for our XL vehicles. After Mojave, we drove into Tehachapi, and proceeded to get lost on some back road that finally passed the Tehachapi Loop (a spiral section of train track which appears to be the town's claim to fame), and then found our way back to the freeway. We didn't end up pulling in at our apartment till about 11:45pm Monday night.

Since we got back, things have been really busy at the office, as well as at home. We got our Chamber-Saddle engine brazed up and ready for firing, as well as ordering most of the components for our first vernier module. I've been working on the CAD model for that thing for some time now. It looks like an octopus with how many wires, hoses, and hardlines it has snaking everywhere, but it's a start. I guess there is only so much you can do to make a gimballed, throttleable, regen-cooled, restartable, bipropellant rocket engine simple while still keeping it sufficiently reliable. Yesterday, we tested the dual-igniter system that we're planning on using for our vehicle vernier modules, and it is really roudy. We were mostly trying to do that to give a bit of operational redundancy, but wow! We were getting 2-3 inch long flames coming our of the engine nozzle. If that doesn't light the propellants, you must have accidentally loaded water instead of IPA.

On the home front, things have also been a bit hectic. The day after we got back, Tiff was feeling a bit naseous in the morning, so we were really worried that maybe we had gotten ourselves food poisoned or something (I had been feeling slightly out-of-sorts on Sunday and Monday myself), or possibly some sort of bug. We heard from several other conference attendees that they had also had food poisoning like symptoms. Jonny was feeling much better, but though. When Tiff was feeling queasy again on Wednesday it really started me worrying. Thursday morning when I woke up she was still feeling sick. I joked that "you sure seem to be sick a lot in the morning. Maybe you're morning sick. Ha, ha." Then I promptly went back to sleep. Ten minutes later Tiff woke me up and said that if we end up moving down to Tehachapi this summer, that we might want to look for a three-bedroom place instead of a two-bedroom. :-)

Anyhow, as you can see, life has been rather hectic as of late, but I plan on blogging a bit about one or two of the interesting things I saw at Space Access, if time ever permits again.

Still more on the Interplanetary Superhighways, and why fantasy trumps fact in movies

by guest blogger Ken

Still more on the Interplanetary Superhighways (IPS), this time in an American Scientist article entitled "The Interplanetary Transport Network". Authored by Shane Ross, definitely one of the authorities on the subject, it is more academic than the recent article in New Scientist, but also a lot more informative in really understanding the concepts.

Shane (I've been corresponding with him off and on since my ISU Master's project on cislunar infrastructure architectures) introduces a lot of well-illustrated concepts in orbital mechanics, but also stresses that these concepts have to be considered geometrically, in three dimensions, and with the effects of gravity thrown into the mix.

He lays out how we've come to our current understanding of the IPSes, from Kepler to Koon & Lo, by way of Poincaré and Farquhar and others. He notes how the understanding of the chaos functions underlying the IPS network have applications in chemistry (and vice-versa), and even galactic manifestations of gravitationally-created tubes.

It's a solid article, well worth the read, and not just because he also notes some of the benefits of an L-1 station. Benefits such as:

1) Hubble-ization of space-based instruments
Assemble them at EML-1, send them to their stations, and return them for servicing in the future with little or no propellant required. I had no idea that the fuel on the Genesis mission was 5% of the spacecraft mass at Earth departure. 5%! That's unheard of! (Well, not anymore...)
2) Optimization of trans-asteroid belt probes
Spacecraft could be dropped into multi-moon missions at the gas giants. q.v. JIMO
3) Ready access to the Moon
Shane says hours to the Moon's surface, I thought it was about a day. In any event, you have global access to the Moon's surface and constant-return capability to EML-1.
4) On-ramp to IPSes

(I've long advocated numbers 1, 3 & 4)

The 8-page article alone makes it worth the $4.95 cover price, and there are a lot of other good articles in there as well, like why TV these days is all cross-cut and jiggly and other annoying things. Turns out that not only are we hard-wired to hone in on motion and complexity, but our brain rewards us for doing so. Wow, so all those couch potatoes out there are stoners. And maybe I should just relax and enjoy those motion-rich banner ads on the internet. It also turns out, no duh, that marijuana (oral) ranks as the least toxic of the recreational pharmaceuticals, and only dextromethorphan (WTHIT?), GHB (date-rape drug), isobutyl nitrate (inhaled), datura (?), nutmeg (oral), and intravenous heroin rank more toxic than alcohol.


On a more pleasant note, Sky & Telescope's June issue has a cover article on "Cosmic Disasters: Fact vs. Fiction". The article is written in the context of an astronomer pitching fact-based movie ideas to a studio exec. Supernovas, black hole birth death rays, and errant black holes are all covered. The author also has a very interesting insight into why Bruce Willis is the one that saves us from an asteroid and not a real NASAnaut.

(What, you thought I was going to give it away? Go buy the magazine...)

One thing that is notable is that the errant black hole scenario is the most plausible of the scenarios in our neck of the woods. What's interesting is that no matter how fast a black hole is traveling it will still leave visible evidence of its presence that will precede it.

A micro-black hole passing through the plane of the ecliptic might have a negligible effect on the larger bodies, but you'll definitely see the effects in the cloud of small objects that also orbit the Sun.

This is one reason why we really need to get to work on developing a census of the objects around us in space. The obvious starting point is the sunward NEOs, which we really know nowhere near enough about. This would be a good job for an instrument parked somewhere beyond the clutter out to GEO. (Golly, EML-1 would be a great place to start, and the setting up of the equipment could be done as a Trans-GEO test-run for a CEV. See how this is all linking together?) Then we get a census out to the asteroid belt, then we get to work on the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud objects.

Is this sexy science? No, not really. However, science is only one of the three aspects of the Vision for Space Exploration. Security is another, and I believe that our men (& women) in uniform would call this type of thing 'Situational Awareness'. As a businessperson I would sure want to know what their composition is, as well as the orbit. That's the commerce side of things.

Perhaps commerce will provide us with the solution. Thinking back to my younger days in NYC I think I have an idea...

Space Access 2006

Well, it's that time of the year again boys and girls! Time for another pilgrimage down to Phoenix for this year's Space Access Conference. This year, Tiff, Little Jon and I will be driving down from the Bay Area. It's a long drive, but we have relatives along the way, and we kind of wanted to have an excuse to drive through Mojave on the way back. And yes, we will be bringing rocket hardware (our regen liner that we've steady-stated).

I've noticed that each year's conference seems to have a different Zeitgeist, and it will be interesting to see what things are like this year. I know that we at MSS have come a long way over the last 12 months, and the rest of the industry is on the move too.

While I'm there, I think that I'm going to see if I can get do a bunch of short interviews with some of the speakers there at the conference. I don't have a laptop, so I likely won't be able to get any of that up on the web till next week, but I figure it's worth doing, even if Clark, and Rand, and others are liveblogging the event now.

Anyway, until then, this blog will likely be pretty quiet unless Ken has something he wants to put up while I'm gone?

MSS Now Taking Sales

I figured that it'd be worth noting that as of today, MSS is now taking sales for suborbital science payloads. We have a special introductory offer for CANSAT sized payloads of only $99 each (normal price will likely be $199 each). CANSATs are packages that have the volume, form factor, and density of a can of pop. Two things that Michael doesn't mention on the site is that at this point it looks like all CANSATs will be positioned such that they will have a direct line of sight to the sky when the payload bay doors open at apogee, so all will be exposed to vacuum, and all will be able to see out axially. The other thing he doesn't mention is that we may be providing USB and maybe power for each of these. While intended for K-12 educational markets, these CANSATs would probably be a pretty cool electronics hacking project for kids in their twenties or thirties. Anyone up to building an ameteur interferometer?

What I've Been Up To Lately

If you're wondering why blogging has been so light as of late, let's just say we've been a bit busy at work these past few weeks. Things are picking up momentum at MSS, with us nearing the completion of our first engine design. I've lost track of the number of firings we've done, but we're over 200 by now, with many of them in the 10, 15 and even 40 second range. All in all, we've met or exceeded several of our design goals for the engine (including having a slightly higher Isp than our target, as well as having a much better throttling range), and are getting quite familiar with the system. We will be testing a flightweight chamber-saddle-jacket version of the engine in the near future (hopefully Saturday), and then we will start putting together the actual vernier module and finish up the engine control programming. I'll post some pictures when we get there, but it looks like we've just about reached another major milestone with this company. There aren't very many companies in the world right now that have a 3:1 throttleable, in-air restartable, fully regen-cooled liquid bipropellant engine.

Now we just have to finish putting that vehicle together.....

Bait and Switch

Man, in the last hour from when I read this story over at Nasawatch.com, Clark Lindsey and Rand Simberg have already commented. So, it looks like the modifications to the SRB are going to take $3B instead of the $1B ATK originally quoted...I'm with Rand on this one--I too am shocked. Shocked, and disturbed. Among my many reactions to this news, I have been shocked, disturbed, and deeply surprised...

As Rand points out, the potential for this blowing up into a scandal seems readily apparent. Here Griffin and some other guys from NSS do a study claiming that a SRB-based vehicle will be cheaper to develop, safer, and better for launching people than an EELV based system. Then Griffin gets into office and pretty much ignores all the CE&R work done by Boeing, Lockheed, and all the other groups. Then he hires Horowitz over from ATK to manage the exact same program on the NASA side that he had been pitching from the ATK side. Now it turns out that they were off by 200% on their initial cost estimate....Oops.

Now, this could be a legitimate error. ATK and a lot of the big boys regularly low-ball stuff like this and screw up on the price, especially once the detailed work comes out and the supposed simplicity of a politically convenient design decision evaporates. Everyone involved may be completely innocent of wrongdoing in this case, and until we have evidence to conclude otherwise, we should probably give them the benefit of the doubt (at least regarding their integrity).

That said, while in all fairness it is too early to cast doubts on their integrity, it's way past time to start doubting the intelligence of trying to shoehorn the SRB into being a first stage. It was a bad idea to start with, and we now have an additional two billion (and counting) reasons to think that it was silly.

I'm still in favor of having NASA force ATK (if they really want to develop the Stick) to do what the EELV guys did, and raise most of the money themselves. If their costs just went up by 200% after the deal, they should be eating the cost increase, not the American taxpayer. Especially if ATK wants to market this vehicle commercially in competition with other commercially derived vehicles like some ATK employees have suggested in the past.

Happy Birthday Indeed

So, apparently John Carmack had a birthday lately....

[Update: Very "lately" apparently...about as lately as mine...as in, back in August. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention. But my second part still stands as is:]

All I can say is, I want one too.

It seemed a dark and stormy night,

but then the Full Moon shone clear and bright
through the clearing clouds.
bad prose by guest blogger Ken

I guess I need to keep New Scientist on my radar a bit more in the future. I was tipped off to the fact that the April 1st issue had a two-article cover feature on "The Moon: A world of opportunity". Since the local Borders doesn't restock till Tuesday, there was still the issue from the prior week (Mar 25-31) which featured a cover article entitled "Celestial Express: Ride the subway to Saturn".

Yup, an article on the Interplanetary Superhighways, and the vital role that Lagrange points play in their functioning. It's as if someone took the L-1 primer found right here in the Selenian Boondocks and made it way, way better. I even learned a couple of things, such as how it looks as if the Earth and all the inner planets may be at the receiving ends of gravitationally formed funnels originating near Jupiter that may have provided a mechanism for conveying matter into the inner Solar system to help form the rocky planets (and may still put us at risk from Jupiter's thunderbolts).

I did find the new issue at B&N, and the articles make a reasonable case for the good science to be done on the Moon. The first article, "The Ultimate Lab" notes several of the key features of the Moon, such as vacuum, cryogenic temperatures, constant sunlight, relative stability, and availability of materials for structural elements. The enabled science of a Moonbase would include not only partial gravity experience in human physiology and plant growth for greenhouses, but also radio astronomy (though I would guess there would be a low murmur of reflected Earth-signals from smaller bodies scattered throughout the inner Solar system), and optical astronomy (absence of atmosphere = GREAT resolution). The particular benefits of siting near the south Lunar pole are also explored.

The second article argues that the Moon is a great place to look for fossils. Not of dinosaurs (though that would be nice), but rather of the Earth. We know that pieces of the Moon get knocked loose by impacts and flung to Earth; now we've begun to explore what kind of impacts can send pieces of the Earth to the Moon. The hope is to find pieces of the earliest days of Earth, so that we may learn more about her infancy. Pieces from the earliest days are hoped to carry fossil traces of the earliest forms of life to be found on Earth. Sounds like a long shot to me, but I would be interested to find a pre-Solar fossil in an asteroid somewhere, a much longer shot by far.

Capping the triple-play of Moon features today is a cover article in the May 2006 Air & Space entitled "Moon 2.0: The Next Lunar Lander". Okay, the cover title is "Moon 2.0", the article is entitled "Son of Apollo". In it, NASA exploration go-to guy John Connolly (whose NExT [NASA Exploration Team] team was looking at L-points before looking at L-points was cool) leads us through some of the design rationales for the LSAM. Noted are some of the frivolities that the Apollo guys didn't have, like an airlock, a portable potty, or maybe large windows. Personally, I'd still like to see more of a sense of reusability in them, but I don't get to design NASA's solutions to their mandates.

Also included in this month's Air & Space are articles on the shuttle tiles and an orbiter docking at the ISS.

For Francophone Aresphiles out there Espace Magazine just did a special "On the surface of Mars" (à la surface de Mars). Lots and lots of luscious photographs, some basic technical-type drawings, a photo of the Spirit & Opportunity team (where're the youngsters?). 98 pages all told. I'd have to say that Espace is one of the best monthly general space magazines around, irrespective of whether it's in French.

So go out, buy copies to share with friends, leave in the office or the bus station, where have you. Do your part to help spread the knowledge of real space right now!