Category Archives: Space

Science, Space

More amazing astrophotos!

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If you don’t already check the Astronomy Picture of the Day each day, you should. Today was a special treat, linking to the Gigagalaxy Zoom project. That web site uses as its dataset three images at tens-of-thousands-by-tens-of-thousands resolution, and you can zoom in on features of each image through a nice Flash interface that includes descriptions of the cosmic bodies you see. The three images are composites of thousands of exposures, and represent three levels of telescopic magnification towards the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

My favorite zoomed-in segment is the Pipe Nebula in the middle-level image:

Center of the Milky Way
Center of the Milky Way

You can see the zoomed segment with its description by clicking here and then clicking on the short, wide rectangle that highlights a dark squiggly nebula in the center of the image. Just look at the number of stars behind the dark nebula! This is the kind of image that makes me feel that I’m very tiny, that the beauty I see in the natural world on Earth is an insignificant fraction of the wonders in the Universe. And it makes me want to get out there and see things!

Best of all, you can download ~26 MB high-res versions of the three base images from the Gigagalaxy download page.

Science, Space

Saturn

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Nicole pointed this image out to me:

Saturn at Equinox
Saturn at Equinox

It’s a natural-color mosaic of 75 images downlinked from the Cassini probe when it was 20 degrees above the ring plane. “Natural color” here is astronomer-speak for “if you were hanging outside an interplanetary spacecraft in a spacesuit 20 degrees above the Saturnian ring midplane, this is what you would see out your helmet visor.”

Full description: http://ciclops.org/view/5773/The_Rite_of_Spring?js=1

Concepts, Music, Space

My version of Constellation

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I’ve been thinking all summer about NASA’s Constellation program. In general, I think it’s great to be getting out of low Earth orbit…but I think the strategic goals of the Vision for Space Exploration and the technical solutions in Constellation are somewhat lacking. My experience this summer at Johnson Space Center, and the Augustine Commission’s generally open mind, have made me very hopeful – I’ve noticed that the people at JSC aren’t as gung-ho Orion-is-the-best-thing-to-hit-space-since-John-Glenn as I feared they would be. (That seems to happen more at Marshall Spaceflight Center, where they are building Ares, and in the mind of Mike Griffin, who has called anybody who wants the current architecture to change “ignorant.” Note that that includes famous people like Buzz Aldrin and a lot of top-flight engineers.)

The current Constellation architecture is a result of basically two factors:

(1) A knee-jerk response to the Columbia disaster. NASA wanted safety during reentry, and it decided that capsules never burn up in reentry. (Never mind that while Shuttle had two major disasters in ~130 missions, Apollo had two major disasters in ~20. The tildes are because both numbers depend a little on how you count.)

(2) The Vision for Space Exploration, which sets a “Moon sorties first, then Mars sorties, and I guess we can support ISS until it’s just barely finished” mission for NASA.

That first item is a terrible point to be feeding directly into strategic planning and design work, because it limits creativity and ingenuity. Right now, Constellation is operating under the assumption that it should use as little new technology as possible. Compare that to the Apollo design days, when engineers designed their spacecraft with materials that had yet to be invented. The second item takes away from Constellation the kind of grandiose vision that could really attract attention and acclaim to NASA. We have gotten complacent with our space program; it seems routine to the ordinary Earthling. That’s the exact opposite of what we need to nuture strong public support of the space program (and science and technology in general): astronauts, flight controllers, scientists, and engineers need to be heroes again.

So where do I think NASA should go, and what should it do to get there? First of all, let’s take a look at the capabilities that NASA has now.

NASA has an incredible low-Earth-orbit capability. The Shuttle lets us bring a lot of mass into orbit. It also lets us bring a lot of mass down from orbit, which is crucially important for the Space Station’s science architecture and is a capability that Orion ignores. We also have a lot of experience with rendezvous, capture, and docking, from the assembly of ISS, Hubble servicing missions, and the like – going all the way back to Gemini – also a versatile capability virtually ignored by Orion. Finally, ISS has given us a lot of long-duration spaceflight experience.

NASA is also very good at getting robots to and operating them on Mars. Sure, several missions failed, but each of those did so because of a specific technical reason which all have known fixes. The last four major missions (Phoenix, MER1 and 2, and MRO) were all – or still are! – rousing successes.

Now let’s look at what’s problematic about today’s space program. The Shuttle is horrendously expensive to operate. It is also unsafe, not because its design is inherently flawed, but because each launch requires a total refurbishment of the vehicle and the vehicles are effectively 20-30 years old.

Here’s what I think NASA ought to do strategically, and (without doing any detailed trade studies, because though I’m a Ph.D. candidate in spacecraft engineering, I am acting as but a humble blogger here) how I think it could get there.

Continue reading My version of Constellation →

Books, Politics, Science, Space

The Unified Space Vision

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On this 40th anniversary of his launch to the Moon, Buzz Aldrin wrote an excellent opinion piece in today’s Washington post. (Speaking of the anniversary, check out the HD restored videos of the landing on NASA’s web site!) Reading it motivated me to go to the Augustine Commission‘s web site and leave them the following comment:

I have had dreams of space ever since I can remember, and grew up watching documentaries about the space program of the 1960’s. Now, I am pursuing a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering – and am working at NASA JSC this summer. I just turned 25 years old.

In my opinion, my generation has lost the focus on science and exploration – but we have more of a fixation on the latest and greatest high-tech gadgetry than anyone before us. We line up to get new smartphones and mp3 players, and then line up again to get the very latest model when it’s released. We are focused on the “new.” To us, who grew up with the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and the legacy of Apollo, the Constellation program does not look “new.” We look at the plans for Orion, Altair, and Ares, and think, “If the mission of NASA is to go to the Moon, why don’t we just dust off the old blueprints for the Saturn V and Apollo CM/LM and get there in just as long as it takes to build those things, instead of by 2020?” My generation has grown up seeing an ever-shorter development cycle on high-tech products. This leads us to wonder how getting *back* to the Moon from our current Shuttle/ISS position is going to take more than a decade, when in the social tumult and limited technology of the 1960’s America went from no human spaceflight to landing men on the Moon in less than a decade. We want to see something NEW, and we want to see if SOON. Something that looks like technology has evolved from the Apollo, Space Shuttle, and ISS stepping-stones rather than backpedaling from Shuttle and ISS. To us, that evolution looks like it is much more like SpaceShipOne than Orion.

If I may be so bold as to offer a suggested solution, I would say that, first, NASA needs a strategic focus on doing something obviously new, something that obviously leverages the latest technologies, something with obvious returns to our lives on Earth. NASA should be pioneering new technologies and actively exploring the Solar System. To me, this means human colonization of Mars, with all the development for a self-sustaining habitat and all the spinoffs to green high tech that entails. My generation is ever more concerned about social justice, energy policy, efficiency, and climate change; and given the similar challenges facing manned spacecraft, this is a perfect opportunity for NASA. In today’s Washington Post, Buzz Aldrin articulates a case for Martian exploration under a Unified Space Vision far better than I could: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/15/AR2009071502940.html

Second, NASA needs to look to new technologies and techniques in accomplishing its goals. Something experimental, something with a high rate of return. It would be fine if it requires a higher up-front investment if it lowers costs in the long term, unlike the Constellation architecture. To that end, I think funding should be restored to NASA programs developing next-generation lifting-body reusable spacecraft rather than capsule spacecraft. NASA needs to show that it can do more than what Scaled Composites did with a $20 million budget. The next-generation spacecraft could even leverage existing Constellation development by using Ares rockets and Shuttle boosters to achieve orbit. The focus should be on correcting the expenses and inefficiencies of the Space Shuttle, not entirely abandoning the architecture of that highly capable spacecraft.

Thank you.

If you are similarly motivated to support the space program and get ourselves kicked up out of low-Earth orbit, leave a comment yourself.

It is definitely beyond the scope of the Commission to designate a specific technical solution, but I had to throw in a plug for my favorite next-gen spacecraft idea. The concept comes from, again, Buzz Aldrin, and I first read about it in his novel The Return, which I picked up at a recent Ithaca library book sale. The basic idea is this:

Take two or three Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters. Modify the SRBs into lifting bodies, put little wings on them, or change the parachutes to paragliders. Then leverage existing UAV technology for all its worth to turn the SRBs into “flyback boosters” that return automatically to their launch site, where they can immediately go into refurbishment between flights. Voila: no ocean recovery means instant savings.

Now take those two or three flyback boosters and put them on something like an existing Atlas V/Centaur booster. (I favor using the Ares design here.) This liquid-fueled booster would be expendable, and provide sustained thrust through the second stage to get the payload into orbit. Of course, the payload could be much bigger than a typical Atlas V payload, such as MRO, thanks to the additional SRB-derived boosters.

Finally, what goes on top of this 2 1/2 stage booster? A manned spaceraft that’s half Space Shuttle and half SpaceShipOne. It would be a craft purely for orbital and reentry operations, so it needn’t be as large as the Shuttle, which incudes powerful main engines for the ascent to orbit. This craft could probably fit a small crew compartment and cargo bay along with an orbital maneuvering system; however, there’s a lot of sense to having a separate crewed version and cargo version. The key thing is that the aerodynamics of the spaceraft body need to be designed with a nice, smooth reentry in mind, and allow the craft to be piloted back to an airstrip. Leverage composites (a great new technology that matured mostly after the Shuttle was first designed) for all they are worth, and again, avoid the expensive water landing.

The result should be something with the range of capabilities of the Shuttle, lots of reusability, little expense compared to both STS and expendable systems, and a pretty big safety factor. I plan to run through some of the calculations when I get back to Ithaca, but I imagine that Space Shutle-sized crews or substantial cargo lifts should be possible.

Movies, Science Fiction, Space

‘Moon’

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I just saw Sam Rockwell in “Moon” today. Wow, what a movie.

The two-second, non-spoiler plot outline is that Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a blue-collar astronaut who works in a one-man mining outpost on the far side of the moon with no live communications to anyone. He’s about to end his three-year contract when, after an accident, he goes out onto the surface and finds a man who happens to look and act exactly like Sam Bell. Now they have to figure out what’s going on.

The movie is a tour de force for Rockwell’s acting, since he spends most of the time playing against himself. The obvious effects aside, he handles the dialog naturally enough that I really forgot that he had to play the two separately – he was really acting with himself. It’s also incredible that he was able to bring out the subtle differences between the Sam Bell who has been in the outpost for three years and the newcomer Sam Bell. There were some physical differences between the two characters, but sometimes it was hard to tell which was which based on visual impression alone. Yet it was always easy to tell one from the other as they interacted. Rockwell really put a lot of ordinary-guy-ness into the character, and put a lot of thought into the effects of isolation and delayed communication. They way his characters handle the mystery they’ve been thrown into is simulatneously heartbreaking and triumphant.

Now I have to talk a bit about the science fiction in this movie. This is sci-fi in its purest form: science and fiction, with a strong grounding in both solid scientific concepts and in dramatic and chracter development. The science is, in fact, not too far removed from our own – perhaps fifty years off – and it looks like everything grew out of the space program as we know it today. The movie goes to show just how well adhering to real science instead of going for cheesy effects, laser sounds in space, and ridiculous robots can move the drama along. Sam Bell eats freeze-dried, reconstituted astronaut food. He has to wear a familiar white spacesuit. His lunar outpost is all form-built white surfaces, but he still uses sticky notes. He has to exercise to keep his muscle tone. And all these things contribute to the frustrations he experiences in his lonely three-year stay.

However, there is only one bit of science that is absolutely necessary to move the plot along – the explanation for Sam’s duplicate. I got the feeling that this sort of story could have happened in many different places or times, and the science fiction is only a vehicle to move the plot along and let us watch these characters deal with their situation. I definitely appreciated that – it’s about time sci-fi broke out of the rut it’s been in, where it’s all about action-adventure and CG explosions.

(Just FYI: Yeah, they really could have done a better job making 1/6 gee gravity apparent. Yeah, there are some sounds in space – but at least they’re muted, BSG-style. And yeah, the rover design is kind of poor for the Moon. But those are about the only scientific gripes I can put down, and look how tiny and insignificant they are!)

This is also a very smart movie. The film shows you enough information to show you what’s going on, and by the end, I understood all that had happened. But it doesn’t tell you straight up what’s happening. There are no scenes where a character explains to another character what just happened or why they are in the situation they are. Instead, we see Sam figuring things out, and we figure things out along with him. It felt like a very participatory movie to me, and I enjoyed that aspect of it a great deal.

This is a wonderful sci-fi movie. It’s definitely an homage to some of the classics, most obviously the spaceship scenes in 2001 (you know, the best part of that movie), and an homage to the days of the classic Heinlein-style sci-fi that followed on the heels of real space exploration; it brings back the feel of when people followed both space movies and space news. And I’m all for that.

For what it’s worth, I hope this movie gets a much bigger exposure in national release. I will also secretly hope for an Oscar nod for Sam Rockwell, because I think the critics have long overlooked SF as a genre in which great acting and writing can happen.